Retooling for the next missionhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/41.12/retooling-for-the-next-mission
Iraq war veterans find a new life in Colorado, this time fighting for the environment with the help of Veterans Green Jobs.Ray Curry comes to breakfast holding his head. He had a late night playing World of Warcraft, no doubt worsened by the relentless noises from the floor above his room. "I'm going to start a formal complaint about the bowling alley upstairs," he says, shuffling over to the egg buffet. "Those kids are just punching the floor." It's not easy living in migrant-worker housing in Center, Colo., a small agricultural town of 2,300. It beats the alternative, though, which until a few weeks ago was couch surfing, and before that, Marine barracks in Iraq.

Here, he shares a small room with a roommate. The walls are baby-blue, the linoleum is clean, and the view is more than decent -- the snowy Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up from the San Luis Valley's over-farmed high grassland. Curry, 24, is one of 15 men spending eight weeks here as part of the first training class of Veterans Green Jobs, a new Colorado-based nonprofit. Until they loaded onto a biodiesel bus in Denver a few weeks ago, four of the 15 were homeless.

Garrett Reppenhagen wipes the hot sauce off his trim beard and stands. "OK, listen up," says Reppenhagen, a burly former sniper who now directs the training. "Today we just have a few audits. We'll send out three teams. For the rest of us, there's a lot to do at base camp." He wears dog tags around his neck and a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses clipped onto his T-shirt.

Reppenhagen is energetic but looks as if he knows how to carefully parcel that energy out for long marches ahead. A high-school dropout who used to work at the Home Depot in Grand Junction, he joined the Army with a good buddy, hoping to see the world and get out of Dodge. It was one month before 9/11. He served in Kosovo, Afghanistan and finally Iraq. As a scout in the jittery Diyala River Valley north of Baghdad, he escorted military convoys, engineered counter-mortar operations and kicked down doors looking for insurgents. He received a medal for saving lives when the roof of a local police building came under attack. Still, Reppenhagen saw the war as a huge disappointment. He didn't feel like he was there for the right reasons. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and more Iraqis turned against the soldiers every day. " ‘Shock and awe' was undermining ‘winning hearts and minds,' " he says.

Coming home after a year in Iraq was also a letdown. Not only was the job market dismal, no one seemed to be interested in helping veterans stay in college or train for work or keep their frayed family relationships together. "You do 16 weeks of basic training to go to war, then you get to do a couple of days of training in resume writing when you get home?" Reppenhagen asks. "That's it?" He started working for a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, Veterans for America, helping with public relations and shepherding legislation to help vets through Congress. But bill after bill failed, leaving him angry and disillusioned. He volunteered for a Washington, D.C.-based group called Iraqi Veterans Against the War, and that's where he met Ray Curry.

Over beers at an Irish pub in Denver a few weeks back, they'd told me their stories. Both Reppenhagen and Curry felt the war had been about oil -- and that, they decided, was a dumb reason to risk your life. In March 2006, Reppenhagen joined a five-day anti-war-and-lame-government-response-to-Katrina march from Mobile, Ala., to New Orleans. In Slidell, he stayed on the property of a veteran who was retrofitting buses and construction equipment with biodiesel made from used vegetable oil. Why fight wars over Persian Gulf oil when you can make your own? For Reppenhagen, who had never been interested in environmental causes, the idea was a revelation.

"Reducing dependence on foreign oil seemed like a solution to better national security," said Reppenhagen. He heard about Veterans Green Jobs, and told Curry. Curry was already a committed environmentalist, a vegetarian who refused to own a car and opted out of consumer culture as much as possible. But it wasn't just the green-resource side of the jobs program that appealed to the two; it was the people side. "A good, meaningful job, and camaraderie and support are what a lot of veterans need," said Reppenhagen. And they need it as soon as they leave the military, before substance abuse and depression have a chance to set in.

Curry, a wiry, intense guy, had been flailing around since his discharge from the Marines in 2005. He'd done some volunteer work, but mostly he bartended in the D.C. area. "I went through three years of self-destructive cycles," he recalled. "A lot of veterans struggle in civilian jobs. It doesn't always pan out. I had authority struggles, some post-traumatic stress. I went from being a leader in the Marines to working in bars in subservient and pointless jobs. It pays the bills but it's not fulfilling." Veterans Green Jobs appeared at the right time. "Veterans believe in service," said Curry. "That's why they enlisted in the first place. But they aren't really serving these days. They need to receive services. This is a way of employing us and getting into career paths."

If the men seem to have recreated barracks life in Center, that's part of the idea.

They are comfortable living and working as a team, says Reppenhagen, and they're used to hands-on training. Support services are available if needed for mental health treatment. "They'll be finding self and purpose in the world and reconnecting with their cohort group," he said. "We're empowering veterans to do something amazing in their lives, where there's a sense of meaning and purpose again, and fold that into beneficial work."

----

After breakfast, I get "embedded" in a team of three dispatched to Alamosa, the valley's biggest town, population 15,000, about 40 minutes away. We drive in Mike Flaherty's beat-up Ford sedan. Flaherty, 27, was a gate guard and fuels operator for the 59th Quartermaster Company. Riding shotgun is Tom Cassidy, 26, who was a logistics specialist and Reppenhagen's roommate in Iraq, and in the back sits Steve "Don't-Call-Me-Buddha" Gutierrez, a veteran of the Marines from the 1980s. For all three, leaving the military has brought its struggles. Gutierrez lost his construction job last year and has been living at his sister's in Arvada, Colo., grappling with the legacy of being a bad-boy Marine.

"It's not a switch you turn off, when you get out of the Marines," says Gutierrez, now 44. "It took me years to notice my behavior was getting me in trouble, and there was no support there." When Flaherty got discharged, he had a drinking problem, and Cassidy suffered intense feelings of guilt and remorse for actions in Iraq.

Flaherty met Reppenhagen when they were both taking classes at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs and Flaherty was working at Joe's Crab Shack.

Flaherty knew his lease was about to be up this spring, and although he wasn't particularly interested in the environment, green-collar jobs seemed like a rare growth industry. About this, of course, he's right. President Obama's stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, directs about $50 billion for renewable energy and efficiency programs nationwide, including about $130 million for weatherizing homes and $50 million for other energy programs in Colorado alone. That could lead to the creation of 59,000 jobs in the state, and 3 million to 4 million nationally.

Cassidy was working at a mall in Bloomington, Ind., when Reppenhagen called his old roommate to recruit him. "What I was doing, selling stuff, was eating at my soul," says Cassidy, who had recently traveled the country and Europe speaking out against the war. "It was a no-brainer for me."

Gutierrez found out about the organization when he walked into the homeless veterans' center in Denver to pick up grocery vouchers and bus fare. A manager there told him Reppenhagen from Veterans Greens Jobs was showing up the next day if he was interested. Gutierrez raced over to a computer and polished up his resume.

As newly certified home energy auditors, the men will be able to earn contract work and train other veterans as the organization branches out to Louisiana, New Mexico and Washington. Today, they will be doing "tier one" work -- basic inspections in homes whose residents requested audits through the state's low-income energy assistance program. The work funds the training and enables the veterans to earn a stipend while learning new skills in various green-collar fields, from energy retrofits to solar installation to biodiesel conversion and forest conservation work.

The stimulus money has been an unanticipated boon to Veterans Green Jobs founder and director, Brett KenCairn. KenCairn is a Wyoming-bred community organizer who worked to retrain loggers in the Pacific Northwest after the spotted owl controversy, and then worked with Native Americans on sustainable forestry projects in Arizona and New Mexico. Now based in Boulder, Colo., he saw linking veterans to green jobs as a solution to two big problems: underemployed vets and an existing workforce too small to tackle global warming. "If we don't figure out how to mobilize a new workforce at a dramatic scale, our chances of averting climate change are virtually nil," KenCairn had told me. "We need to retrofit every building in our built environment. Veterans represent one of the best workforce assets because they're already ready for rapid training and deployment," he says. "Our motto is: ‘Retool for Your Next Mission.' "

The Wal-Mart Foundation loved the idea and provided $750,000 in seed money for the first trainings. In Colorado, the Governor's Energy Office currently funds and oversees weatherizing about 4,000 homes a year. The stimulus bill will double or triple that for the next three years, according to deputy director Seth Portner. When the work goes up for bid, Portner thinks Veterans Green Jobs stands a good chance of winning some contracts. "Having been acquainted with the Veterans Green Jobs concept, I think it's nothing short of brilliant," he says.

By the end of the summer, 200 veterans will receive green-jobs training, with a goal of tripling that number in 2010. Trainees can receive college credit if they want it, and many will gain professional certification in at least one of four areas having to do with energy efficiency retrofits: as a building analyst, an "envelope" professional, a home energy rating auditor, or a computer systems auditing analyst.

If Reppenhagen is right, this program could help ease the ache of a bad war, both for the veterans themselves and their oil-hungry homeland. Guys like Gutierrez, Cassidy and Flaherty may be just the bridge America needs to popularize the green economy. "The link to average Americans is missing right now," he says. "It's one thing to want to be a hippie in Boulder and hug a tree; it's a whole other level to be a veteran and say, ‘Hey, I'm coming home from a war fighting for oil.' I think the culture clash could be decreased by realizing there's something seriously patriotic about energy independence."

----

Flaherty, Cassidy and Gutierrez practically leap from the car at a small blue house on State Street. After several weeks of training, they're a well-coordinated team in their matching green sport shirts, cracking jokes as they carry in their tools, lightbulbs and paperwork. If this were a movie, it would be Ghost Busters meets An Inconvenient Truth, with a little Jarhead thrown in. Bernardine Atencio, visibly pregnant, answers the door. She volunteered for this audit to help cut her monthly expenses. She explains that she recently moved into the rental, but has lost her job. And she has other problems: "My refrigerator keeps freezing my food and ruining it," she says.

Flaherty starts dismantling her chandelier while Cassidy explains that replacing one incandescent lightbulb can save $50-$70 over the lifetime of the bulb. Next, Flaherty tests her water temperature. At 156 degrees, it's about 30 degrees hotter than it should be. "Oh man, this will save her $12 a month," he says. Cassidy studies her electric bill. "Your kilowatts are high -- 995 is a lot. That may be your fridge acting too cold." Gutierrez determines that the freezer registers -8 degrees, when it should be closer to zero.

Cassidy dons a headlamp and mask and goes off to look at the attic and basement insulation. (There is none.) He tells Atencio she'd be a good candidate for a tier two or tier three retrofit, which Veterans Greens Jobs hopes to be doing soon. As they prepare to depart for their next assignment, Cassidy calls out reassuringly, "Hopefully, we'll save you some money on your bills, make life a little easier."

At the next stop, a trailer surrounded by chain-link fence and a warning sign, the resident is a no-show. (Every day, there's at least one.) The team, though, has become efficient. They will audit 250 houses in nine weeks. On the weekends, they do team-building exercises, take art and poetry classes and tour the area. I ask if they've visited the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.

"Are you kidding me?" groans Flaherty. "I will be so happy if I never see another sand dune in my entire life." Even so, Colorado must seem pretty nice after Iraq. "It's beautiful here," says Flaherty, "but there's a lot of poverty. We've come back with a low tolerance for injustice. That's why it feels good to actually be helping people."

Even though changing light bulbs is a small step toward a green revolution, the men clearly feel good about it. Says Cassidy, "Instead of destroying people's lives, we're helping them. It's a hell of a lot more fun than busting down doors and pointing guns in people's faces. This is a small-enough community that I feel like we're making a difference."

Their own prospects are looking better, too, both in terms of future employment and their own mental health. Gutierrez expects to land in Oklahoma City for more training in weatherization with Western Fibers, an insulation company. Flaherty and Cassidy will be hired by Veterans Green Jobs to help expand the program. They largely attribute their personal recoveries to just hanging out together. "Here," says Cassidy, "we're forced to build relationships with each other. It's kind of like peer counseling. A lot of veterans don't trust people that aren't vets. Living together like this puts you at ease to say things, share thoughts. Just saying it helps."

After three more home visits, the men return to their cafeteria in Center for a dinner of chicken fajitas and rice. Before tonight's class in Environmental Ethics, during which they will discuss responsibility, authoritarianism and their roles as agents of change, Flaherty runs up to his room. It looks like a dorm, with a metal bunk bed, a pile of dirty laundry and a stash of snack food. A surprising shock of color comes from the patchwork quilt on the bed -- made by Flaherty's great-grandmother, he tells me. It's a reminder of a softer, sweeter connection to civilian and family life. Maybe Center's barracks are not that much like those in Iraq, after all. Here the men are just a stretch of asphalt from home. They can see their future, and it looks pretty good.

Florence Williams is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and also writes for the New York Times and other publications. She lives in Colorado.

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2009/07/20 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOn Cancer’s Trailhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/371/17708
The women in Stefanie Raymond-Whish’s family have a
history of breast cancer, and the young Navajo biologist wants to
know whether the uranium on the reservation might have something to
do with it. FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

Stefanie Raymond-Whish was 9 years old when her
grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A traditional Navajo
who raised 15 children after her husband died in a car wreck,
Raymond-Whish's ama' sa' ni seldom spoke about
her illness. Even after her surgery, when she lived with the
grandchildren and their mother, she always acted strong around the
kids. It became a pattern: When Raymond-Whish was 13, her
38-year-old mother, Nellie Sandoval, was also diagnosed with breast
cancer. And Sandoval was equally reserved on the subject. "My
mother was really good about not appearing sick in front of us,"
says Raymond-Whish, now 32. "As a little girl, I knew about cancer,
but didn't understand the impact of it at the time."

She
understood it better by the time she was in college, in Flagstaff,
Ariz., when a new tumor appeared in her mother's other breast.
"When my mom had her recurrence, that's when it really hit me ...
it was really upsetting. I went home to Farmington for her
lumpectomy." Sandoval survived the disease, but not without a long
struggle that included chemotherapy, radiation, and finally a
double mastectomy. "My breasts were pretty mangled," says Sandoval,
now 58. "So I said, 'Just get rid of them.' " Both Sandoval and her
daughter have made breast cancer and its impact on Navajos the
focus of their lives. Sandoval became an activist and filmmaker,
working out of her papaya-colored home in Farmington, N.M.
Raymond-Whish has taken her mission a step further: She works as a
molecular biologist at the University of Northern Arizona,
searching for breast cancer's root causes. "Is there any difference
in how breast cancer develops in Native Americans and non-Native
Americans?" she asks. One possible - and provocative - answer is
emerging from her lab at the university: uranium.

Scientists have long known that uranium damages human cells. But in
over six decades of atomic health testing, no one had ever noticed
that uranium, at low doses, can act like an estrogen. No one, that
is, until recently, when Raymond-Whish and her coworkers observed
some unusual effects in lab animals.

Uranium can be found
in several of the Jurassic sandstones that lie beneath the Four
Corners region like a wrecked layered pastry. The target of
frenzied mining throughout the Cold War, uranium ore has been
wrenched from the ground, pulverized, milled and tossed in tailings
across the Navajo Reservation. Low-level radioactive waste has
dissolved into groundwater, escaped onto dust particles and blown
off thousands of passing trucks to settle uneasily on surface
soils. Over 1,000 abandoned uranium mines pockmark Navajo lands,
but only half of them have been reclaimed. Exposure to uranium and
its daughter elements has been linked to lung cancer, kidney damage
and bone disease in Navajos, and it is the suspected culprit in
numerous other medical conditions, from degenerative nerve disease
and birth defects to a variety of other cancers.

Raymond-Whish's research lab is tucked inside a neo-Grecian edifice
on the Northern Arizona University campus. With her gloved hands in
a ventilated booth, the white-coated scientist carefully measures
out uranium in solution into small test tubes. The solution will be
injected into dishes of cultivated human breast cells, donated by a
nun who died of breast cancer in 1979. The MCF-7 cells, as they are
known, have been kept alive by the Michigan Cancer Fund through 178
generations of cell division. They are famous among researchers for
the properties they exhibit in lab experiments. For example,
estrogen causes them to proliferate rapidly - exactly as it does in
real-life breast tissue, which is why many women diagnosed with
breast cancer have their estrogen-producing ovaries removed.
Raymond-Whish wants to see if the cells react in the same way to
uranium.

"What I'm really interested in is the
development of the mammary gland," says Raymond-Whish, who at this
point is just weeks away from finishing her doctoral dissertation.
A former teen rodeo star in barrel racing, she once wanted to be a
veterinarian. But NAU didn't have a vet school, so she majored in
zoology. That eventually landed her in the Discovery Research lab,
where she studied the effects of pollution on tadpoles. She found
she loved research. "It's like being a detective," she says.

----

The lab's discoveries have already
demolished the conventional wisdom on the properties of uranium.
Not only does the heavy metal appear to alter mammary cells at very
low doses, but it also seems to interfere with normal hormonal
signals. Sometimes the uranium follows the same pathways as
estrogen, but sometimes it doesn't, which means it's triggering
other endocrine responses as well. "We don't yet know the mechanism
of how uranium is affecting these cells," Raymond-Whish says, "but
we do know an estrogen receptor is involved. We see it in both
animals and MCF-7 cells."

Although the work in
Raymond-Whish's lab is considered pure research science, it is
impossible to sift it from the real-world context of her family,
her culture and her beliefs. Breast, uterine and ovarian cancers
have risen steeply in Indian country since the advent of uranium
mining. Having watched her grandmother and mother suffer, and now
with two kids of her own, 14 and 4 years old, Raymond-Whish can't
help but wonder if she's next in line.

But while
Raymond-Whish's intimate acquaintance with cancer may harm her
credibility as a dispassionate scientist, it may also propel her to
help make startling discoveries where no one else has thought to
look.

The lab's investigation started
several years ago, when Northern Arizona University became part of
a team that received a five-year grant from the National Cancer
Institute. The project is designed to address community health
care, so the local Navajo elders had a few suggestions. They told
the scientists they wanted to know more about the health effects of
uranium pollution.

"So I started adding uranium to the
drinking water of my lab animals," recalls physiologist Cheryl
Dyer, who was Raymond-Whish's faculty advisor at the time. "And
because I'm an ovarian physiologist, I wanted to see what happened
in the ovary." Uranium has long been known to be radioactive and
toxic, but no one had ever looked at its effects on follicle
counts, or the number of "pre" eggs - eggs in the ovary that have
not yet been released for fertilization. Dyer and Raymond-Whish
found that the number of pre-eggs declined with low exposure to
uranium, and that the mice developed heavier-than-normal uteruses.
Normally, a toxic chemical will cause an organ such as a kidney to
shrink, not expand. "I said, 'Whoa, what is going on here?' " says
Dyer. "I started to wonder if there were other heavy metals that
cause these changes, and it turns out cadmium does the same thing.
That's when a light bulb went off in my head. Cadmium is an
estrogen mimic." All those decades of lab work with atomic
elements, and "they had completely missed the boat on estrogen
mimicry."

Raymond-Whish was the lead author of a paper
showing the unexpected effects of uranium on mouse follicle counts,
uterine weights and accelerated puberty. "Drinking Water with
Uranium below U.S. EPA Water Standard Causes Estrogen Receptor
Dependent Responses in Female Mice" was published in December in
Environmental Health Perspectives, a
peer-reviewed journal put out by the National Institutes of
Environmental Health Sciences. Raymond-Whish concluded that uranium
acts as an estrogen, and she recommended that Navajo girls and
women be followed closely for reproductive cancers. In
conversation, Dyer makes her opinion clear: The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency should lower its drinking water standard for
uranium from 30 micrograms per liter to 20 micrograms, the Canadian
standard. But Dyer and Raymond-Whish are tip-toeing out on a
treacherous scientific limb by suggesting policy changes that are
based on controversial data.

Raymond-Whish's work and its
results have landed her in the middle of a scientific and
regulatory quagmire. It's one thing to regulate a chemical known to
be toxic at high doses; it's entirely another to suggest regulating
minute levels of a substance that is readily found across a large
swath of the American West. Many communities, not just those on the
reservation, are affected by uranium. Recent tests in Colorado, for
example, revealed that 37 cities and towns in the state depend on
drinking water that exceeds federal levels for uranium and its
daughter nuclides.

Uranium
is not just an emotional issue for Raymond-Whish, but for
the tribe as a whole. The legacy of mining the element on the
27,000-square-mile reservation is so deeply and collectively felt
that the Navajo Nation banned it altogether in 2005 in the face of
globally rising ore prices. During the '40s and the Cold War
period, the U.S. government used yellow cake - or milled and
concentrated uranium ore - to build nuclear weapons. The government
stopped buying the ore for weapons in 1971, but the commercial
nuclear energy market picked up the slack until the early 1980s.
Only about a quarter of all U.S. uranium miners were Native
American - Laguna, Hopi, Zuni and Ute as well as Navajo. But Native
Americans have been disproportionately affected: Their tribal lands
are still contaminated, and former miners suffer illnesses and
deaths for which many families are still awaiting compensation.

Despite the tribal ban, at least five companies are
seeking state permits in New Mexico to mine lands just off the
reservation, including on tribal allotment land. In Arizona, 700
individual mining claims were filed in 2005. The prehistoric sea
and river beds that run underground from Naturita, Colo., to
Grants, N.M., and across to Moab, Utah, still hold an estimated 600
million pounds of low-grade ore. But for every 4 pounds of uranium
extracted, 996 pounds of slightly radioactive waste is left over,
in piles, in pits and eventually in the soil, arroyos and
underground aquifers.

----

Some Western tailings piles, like
those outside of Monticello, Utah, or Grand Junction, Colo., have
been cleaned up. But those on tribal lands have fallen through
yawning bureaucratic and regulatory gaps. It's estimated that up to
25 percent of unregulated water sources on the Navajo Reservation
exceed federal drinking water standards for uranium. And many
families still haul water from these wells, despite warnings by
health providers and advocacy groups.

In her lab
experiments, Raymond-Whish applies concentrations of
uranium that match those of water supplies in parts of the Four
Corners, at or slightly above the current EPA standard. She will
treat the mammary cells - which come bathed in a red wash of
nutrients that resembles weak Kool-Aid - twice in nine days with
differing doses. She will then collect the breast cells, extract
their protein signatures, and use a tedious process to examine
differences in the number of their estrogen receptors. She will
also feed rats different mixtures of uranium-tainted water and
examine their mammary glands for altered development. She will
compare those results to rats fed a well-known synthetic estrogen,
diethylstilbestrol, or DES, and to rats that have drunk plain tap
water. She'll look for changes to the mammary glands' terminal end
buds, lobules and milk ducts, changes that may make them more prone
to breast cancer. The work is controversial, and its implications,
both for the science of breast cancer and for the treatment of past
and future mining pollution, could be profound.

Like
Marie Curie over a century before, Raymond-Whish is both repelled
and fascinated by the heavy element's mysterious abilities to alter
living cells. In some respects, Raymond-Whish and Curie are not
dissimilar. Curie, a Polish Jew working in anti-Semitic France, was
the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. As the first Navajo to be
awarded a Ph.D. in the Biology Department of NAU, Raymond-Whish
displays a confident ease in navigating a different dominant
culture. Like Curie, she is driven by an unrelenting curiosity.

If it was a difficult journey from being Rookie of the
Year in barrel racing to creating stunning presentations on heavy
metals, Raymond-Whish doesn't show it. She moves through the
fluorescent-lit lab in a quiet, deliberate fashion, her long, shiny
hair neatly in place.

"I like it
that you're working on something no one knows the answers to and
you're finding the answers," says Raymond-Whish. She grew up in
Colorado and New Mexico with her siblings, stepfather and mother,
who was a high school guidance counselor before becoming a
breast-cancer activist. Forty-four percent of Navajos do not
graduate from high school, but Raymond-Whish's mother made sure
that she did. "Everybody's saying it's a big deal for me to get a
Ph.D. For me, nothing less was expected than, 'You're going to
college.' "

The lab work is routine - even tedious - but
it's also demanding and consuming. She is tired. With her oral
defense looming before a committee of distinguished faculty, she
doesn't slow down. In the mornings, she drops her two kids at
school. Her husband, Bryan, a Wichita Indian, works nearby in the
university's admissions office. She shuttles from the tissue
culture room down a long linoleum-floored corridor to the animal
histology lab with its wide-screened computer that magnifies mouse
ovary sections 40 times over. Scrolling across the screen to count
the follicles is her least favorite job. "I get motion sick," she
says. The ovaries dominate the screen like giant pink potato chips,
lightly salted.

The science of endocrine
disruptors, which studies chemicals that mimic hormones,
is a little over 10 years old and still rife with skeptics. It has
only been in recent years that very low doses of chemicals - in the
parts-per-billion range - have been measurable. (A part per billion
is the equivalent of one kernel of corn in a corn-filled silo 45
feet tall.) But natural hormones do their work at these very low
levels in the human body. One theory holds that certain
environmental chemicals, both natural and man-made, can bind to and
deceive the hormone receptors.

These receptors are the
signal towers that trigger - or prevent - cellular responses that
govern everything from metabolism to sex. Artificial chemicals
scramble the signals. They appear to be interfering with normal
cellular communication and altering how and when the cells, glands
and organs develop. Endocrine disruptors have been implicated in
obesity, infertility and the timing of puberty as well as in
cancer. When many older women stopped taking synthetic estrogen a
few years ago, breast cancer rates in this country dropped for the
first time in 40 years. DES, the control substance used by
Raymond-Whish, was given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages
up until 1971. Their daughters, who were exposed to it in the womb,
have been stricken with unusual reproductive cancers, and recent
studies have shown an increased risk of breast cancer as well.

Typical carcinogens cause a cell's DNA to mutate,
eventually leading to cancer. Radiation causes the fragile chains
of DNA to break, also leading to errors and mutations. Scientists
know a lot about these two types of cancer-causing agents. But
endocrine disruption is far more mysterious.

Which is why
scientists like Raymond-Whish find themselves at a unique moment in
science, just as the traditional models of understanding disease
are shifting. The field of breast cancer research in particular is
driving the debate. Chemicals such as atrazine and DDT (an
herbicide and a pesticide, respectively), plastics - such as the
bisphenol A compound found in Nalgene that was banned from baby
bottles this spring in Canada - and now uranium, are challenging
and confounding scientists seeking to understand the actions of
chemicals in the human body.

In the dynamic field of
environmental health, toxicologists - who study traditional
dose-response curves of carcinogens - and endocrinologists - who
study extremely low levels of chemicals that do not always follow
expected linear curves - frequently disagree. Because it is not yet
known exactly how chemicals like uranium act upon cells, some
scientists flatly dispute Raymond-Whish's findings. "Uranium is not
plausibly linked as an endocrine disruptor," says toxicologist
Margaret Ruttenber, director of the environmental health studies
program of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the
Environment. "There is an absence of a known mechanism."

----

Louise Canfield, director of the Native
American Cancer Research Partnership at the University of Arizona,
says: "My personal opinion is that obesity and other lifestyle
factors are key risks (for breast cancer), along with access to
care. Uranium in drinking water is a health hazard for sure, but
I'm not sure it's a primary cause of cancer."

But others
consider the work groundbreaking. "This is a science of subtlety,"
explains Andrea Gore, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of
Texas, Austin, and former advisor to the National Science
Foundation. "(Dyer's and Raymond-Whish's) work is consistent with
other good labs. People criticize the field of endocrine disruption
because we don't always understand the mechanisms, but the effects
are still real. This is why animal studies are so important. The
responses we see in lab animals can happen in humans, because we
share the exact same hormones. The estrogen receptor is similar."

Still, more evidence is needed before scientists concede
a link between uranium and breast cancer in humans. "You can make a
very strong case with animal studies, but it will never be
definitive," says cancer expert Joaquin Espinosa, professor of
molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. "You hope that nature would have done the
experiment for you out there at some point. You need to show that
real people are affected."

But epidemiological data on
the reservation is hard to come by. For one thing, it's difficult
to sort out reliable cancer statistics and their changes over time.
Some Navajo elders consult only medicine men, so some cancers go
unreported. Cancer itself is translated in Navajo as Lood
doo nadziihii, "the sore that does not heal." Some
patients do not seek treatment, nor do they even speak of the
disease for fear of wishing it upon their families, according to
Fran Robinson, a nurse oncologist at San Juan Regional Medical
Center in Farmington. Until recently, the Indian Health Services
kept haphazard records in which diagnoses went unconfirmed and
doctors came and went. For a variety of reasons, including
instances of abuse of trust by researchers, the Navajo Nation
guards its own data as closely as any member of the former Soviet
bloc.

The New Mexico State Tumor Registry keeps
statistics on cancers by county, including those on the New Mexico
portion of the reservation, which is also where many uranium mines
were located. In her published paper, Raymond-Whish cites registry
data from the late 1970s showing a 17-fold increase in childhood
reproductive cancers there compared to the U.S. as a whole. These
are extremely rare cancers that are related to hormone systems.
Another study looking at registry data from 1970-1982 showed a
2.5-fold increase in these cancers among all Native Americans in
New Mexico. (Although these statistics are not broken down by
tribe, most of the Native Americans in the state are Navajo.) A
1981 paper showed a possible link between incidents of birth
defects in families and the proximity of those families to uranium
mine tailings. The sample sizes of the first two studies were too
small to draw solid conclusions, and the birth defects study was
flawed, cautions Charles Wiggins, director of the Tumor Registry.
He plans to re-examine childhood cancer statistics this fall, using
new data gathered since 1982.

Overall, Native Americans
in New Mexico actually suffer less cancer than the rest of the
country, including about half the rate of breast cancer. But even
as breast cancer rates in the U.S. have leveled or dropped slightly
in recent years, they continue to grow among Native Americans, and
the rate has increased more steeply over the past three decades.
Breast cancer is the number-two killer (after heart disease) of
Navajo women and the most common cancer found in Navajos. (In the
U.S. as a whole, lung cancer is the most common cancer.) Navajos
with cancer also suffer higher mortality rates due to poor access
to medical care. One study found that between one-third and
one-fifth of Navajo breast cancer patients receive substandard
care. Relatively more young Navajo women get breast cancer,
although much of this can be explained by demographics: Navajos
have a younger population than other groups. To the doctors working
on the reservation, the anecdotal evidence is disturbing. "When we
see women in their 30s with breast cancer, it really knocks
everyone for a loop," says physician Tom Drouhard, who has been
practicing in Tuba City, Ariz., for 30 years. "Our ladies come in
with later stages and higher death rates. It's hard to say what the
trends are. All of these tumors are multi-factorial, and uranium
could be another thing thrown at it. We are very paranoid about the
situation with uranium. We had uncovered tailings five miles from
Tuba City for 20 years. It's a reasonable concern."

Two other hormonally active cancers, uterine
and ovarian cancers, have doubled or tripled in New Mexico Indians
since 1970 while remaining essentially the same for Anglos and
Hispanics. But although lung cancer in the Navajo population has
been authoritatively linked to uranium exposure, it's harder to
make the case for other cancers.

"It's a tough nut to
crack," says Wiggins. "The rise in breast cancer everywhere almost
certainly has to do with hormones more than anything else. Is
something going on with hormones and hormone receptors? Our data is
not going to make or break any one hypothesis, because there are a
zillion factors going up or down. But you have to take seriously
any proposition anyone comes out with, because we just don't have
answers yet."

It's difficult to trace a disease to an
environmental exposure that may have occurred years earlier. And so
far, cancer cases have not been mapped in concert with drinking
water sources. "Is there more breast and reproductive cancer here?"
asks Dyer. "Yes, but you can't localize it geographically. It would
be nice to establish a connection between where people are getting
sick and where they drink their water. It's hard to get the data.
It's frustrating."

One major effort is currently under
way to do just that, but the sickness in question is kidney
disease, not cancer. This five-year, $2.5 million study, a
collaboration between the University of New Mexico Community
Environmental Health Program, the Eastern Navajo Health Board and
the Dine Network for Environmental Health, is being funded by U.S.
Health and Human Services. The team is compiling illness data from
1,300 Navajos, backed up by urine and blood samples, and then
overlaying the results on a map of 160 drinking wells that have
been studied for uranium, arsenic and other contaminants.
Preliminary data from 550 residents and 100 wells have already
shown that living within .8 kilometer of an abandoned mine is a
significant predictor of kidney disease and diabetes. Although the
science linking uranium with kidney disease is solid, it's never
before been demonstrated on a real-life map showing proximity to
mines, says Chris Shuey, an environmental scientist at the
Southwest Research and Information Center. Once the kidney data are
in, the researchers might look at cancer next, he says.

Of course, Navajos are not the only population exposed to uranium.
What about breast cancer rates in other areas with better data?

Susan Pinney is an epidemiologist at the University of
Cincinnati. She and her colleagues looked at the population
surrounding a nuclear processing facility in Fernald, Ohio, which
operated between 1952 and 1989. The facility, which made fuel rods
for nuclear power plants, was the site of numerous accidental
releases of uranium into the surrounding air and water. As a result
of a $73 million class action lawsuit in 1990 against National Lead
of Ohio and the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fernald Medical
Monitoring Project has accumulated 17 years worth of data on
illnesses and exposures. Pinney examined the medical records of
8,770 people, including nearly 5,000 women, for a variety of
cancers, and was able to model the exposure level of each
individual. Her work is still being prepared for publication, and
she declined to discuss it. However, a presentation of her
preliminary, statistically significant findings last November to
the annual conference of the Breast Cancer and the Environment
Research Centers is now available on-line. Its provocative
conclusion: "For women living within five miles of a uranium
processing plant, degree of exposure to uranium particulates was
related to risk of incident breast cancer."

----

A few months ago, Raymond-Whish held
a traditional Kinaalda ceremony for her
daughter, Darby, to mark her passage into puberty. One of the most
important Navajo rituals, it celebrates fertility, the natural
order and harmony with the earth through song and prayer.
Raymond-Whish's mother was there along with dozens of other
relatives, and Dyer from the biology department at NAU also
attended. For Raymond-Whish, it was a happy, soulful event, but
shadowed by the uncomfortable realities of her career in cancer
research. From now until late middle age, Darby will produce the
large pulses of estrogen that have been linked to breast and other
cancers in so many women. And natural harmony, as her mother knows,
is not what it used to be, especially now that pollutants are
acting like even more estrogen in our bodies. Raymond-Whish can
only hope that Darby's cells have the normal number of receptors,
and that her genes and her environment haven't somehow conspired to
reprogram her development.

"What does artificial estrogen
do to the breast?" she asks. "It depends on the time of exposure.
If you look at cells of a younger individual who's not yet through
puberty, and you expose them to uranium, then that could promote
earlier onset of puberty, earlier breast budding. And if they're
exposed in the womb, you could be changing the way the receptors
are expressed through life."

In breast cancer research in
general, there is a fundamental shift from large epidemiological
studies that look at women's current lifestyles and exposures to an
examination of what the women were exposed to as children. "Most
epidemiology starts with the moment a tumor is diagnosed," said
Irma Russo, a molecular biologist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in
Philadelphia. "We need to look at when normal cells may have
transformed many years earlier."

Suzanne Fenton, a
research biologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
agrees. "We think one of the main drivers of breast cancer is what
changes occurred in very early life to alter breast development.
It's a fairly radical re-thinking."

Among other
experiments, Raymond-Whish is exposing pregnant rats to uranium in
order to track what happens in their offspring. When she tried this
earlier with mice, the female pups exposed in the womb entered
puberty approximately two days earlier, just as they did when
exposed to DES. It's a subtle difference, but when combined with
other real-life exposures, it may add up.

Explains
Fenton: "It's important to remember that breast cancer risk is
likely determined by a number of compounds interweaving with
genetic factors and not just any one exposure."

Certainly, lifestyles on the reservation have changed in many ways
over the past 50 years. "Once upon a time there was no diabetes
here, no diverticulitis, no colon cancer," says physician Drouhard.
"We are now exposed to the same things you are: plastics, fast
food, obesity. Now everybody I know eats at Kentucky Fried
Chicken." One way to learn more is by working with all those
nose-twitching rodents in the lab. In the coming months,
Raymond-Whish will repeat her experiments, prepare to publish
again, and spend more time staring at the nauseating giant ovaries
on the computer screen. The rats are euthanized before they
actually get sick. Still, she says, they do have to offer up their
organs to science. It's not easy for her to kill the animals.
"Culturally, it's an issue," she says. "But I'm searching for
something that's going to help somebody or even lots of people. I
always say, 'Thank you for your life.' "

Florence Williams is a 2007-2008 Scripps Fellow at the
University of Colorado, where she is researching endocrine
disruption and cancer. A former HCN staffer, she currently serves
on the HCN board.

This story was funded by a grant from
the McCune Charitable Foundation.

Nellie Sandoval, the mother of scientist Stefanie
Raymond-Whish, has become an outspoken activist as a result of her
own struggle with breast cancer.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesMining2008/05/26 16:45:00 GMT-6ArticleAn activisthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/371/17719
Nellie Sandoval, the mother of scientist Stefanie
Raymond-Whish, has become an outspoken activist as a result of her
own struggle with breast cancer.Scientific research on breast cancer is important,
but if lives on the reservation are being saved right now, it's
largely through the efforts of people like Nellie Sandoval,
Stefanie Raymond-Whish's mother. Sandoval, a retired high school
guidance counselor, works to ensure that Navajo women get yearly
check-ups to detect cancer early. If cancer is found, she helps the
women understand their treatment options. As she has learned,
Navajo women face unusually high barriers to recovery.

Sandoval was 38 when she was first diagnosed with the disease.
Because her mother had cancer, she was already getting regular
mammograms, something only 47 percent of American Indian women over
age 40 do (compared to 71 percent of white women). The support of
her family, along with the care of Fran Robinson, a nurse with the
San Juan County Regional Cancer Center who has become a good
friend, helped her get through surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Determined to help others, Sandoval organized a support
group in 1992 through the American Cancer Society's Reach to
Recovery Program for local women dealing with the disease. Because
she is the only volunteer who speaks Navajo, she began visiting
with newly diagnosed native women.

"A number of Navajo
women are dying from breast cancer," says Sandoval, now 58. "Even
though the incidence is low compared to the rest of the country, so
many here are under 40 with little children. I see it time after
time. The cancer I see is horrible, nasty. I think, "This is crazy,
how can this happen, how can this kind of disease exist in the
United States today?' It became my passion."

Sandoval
noticed some disturbing facts: The native patients were not only
younger than their Anglo counterparts, more of them seemed to die
within one year of diagnosis. The cancer they had was simply worse.
In the U.S. overall, only 10 percent of patients present with stage
3 or 4 cancer - advanced cancer that has already spread to other
parts of the body. At the Tuba City hospital, that figure is 36
percent.

"My ultimate goal is to save other lives through
early detection," says Sandoval. She and Robinson decided to make a
Navajo-language video encouraging women to get regular mammograms
and perform self-exams. The last one is particularly tricky, she
says.

"To touch yourself in that way is taboo," says
Sandoval. "Fran and I realized there was no way to dance around it,
because you can't do a breast self-exam without touching yourself.
The statistics are that 80 percent of tumors are found by women
themselves. So you have to talk about it to have the knowledge to
know what to do. I didn't know how to square it up. I just decided
to face it head on and talk about it."

The women secured
funding, made a high-production video featuring a medicine man
singing a blessingway, and took it to chapter houses all over the
reservation. Not everyone appreciated their effort. "To even speak
of cancer or illness is to wish it upon others and yourself,"
explains Sandoval, whose living room features a Navajo blanket
draped by the fireplace and dozens of family photos, including
Stefanie at a rodeo and two sons in military uniform. "One Navajo
woman at a meeting was screaming at me, "Why are you talking about
this and wishing evil on us, don't you know any better?' She's an
elder. But my purpose is to educate and save people's lives."

Sandoval was able to transcend the superstitions because
she straddles two worlds comfortably. She grew up on the
reservation in a family of 15. Times were hard: Her father, a
migrant rail worker, died in a car accident when she was only 2.
She was sent to a government boarding school, then to a public
school, and finally to a Methodist missionary high school. There,
one of her teachers encouraged her to attend college. With her
children in tow, she went on to graduate school in secondary-school
counseling at the University of Northern Colorado. While she speaks
fluent Navajo, her children do not.

After making the
first video, Sandoval realized early detection wasn't enough. Many
traditional women believe that cancer can never be cured. In
Navajo, they call it Lood doo nadziihii

, the
sore that can't be healed. Even if the women eventually travel to a
hospital for treatment, sometimes they don't understand their
doctors. Sandoval describes one 39-year-old sheepherder who did not
speak English and thought her surgeon wanted to slit her throat.
She never followed up with treatment and died less than a year
later.

Sandoval and Robinson are determined to change the
Navajo term for the cancer. They have also made a second
Navajo-language video, this one about standard treatments, which
features native women who have been cured. With funding from the
National Cancer Institute, they took it on the road and distributed
it to area medical centers. After that, they made another video on
side effects of treatment, and now they are working on a fourth
about medical complications of the disease.

Sandoval also
serves on the national advisory board of the Susan G. Komen
Foundation, which supports breast cancer research and patient
services. She talks to her daughter Stefanie nearly every
day.]]>No publisherMiningArticleA wellhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/371/17718
Glenda Rangel and her family grew up drinking from and
swimming in water tanks dangerously polluted with
uranium. According to locals, the boom around here began when a
Navajo named Paddy Martinez walked into a bar in 1950 and set off a
Geiger counter. He'd been dozing under a limestone ledge and woke
up covered in yellow dust. Martinez's granddaughter, Glenda Rangel,
still lives on the family compound just north of Prewitt, N.M.
Although 350 million pounds of uranium ore eventually made its way
to daylight, her family never benefited from the discovery, she
says.

On a windy day in March, Rangel's husband, Ernest,
practices his golf putt on a rug in the living room. Her
12-year-old son, Billy, is wriggling into chaps to practice some
calf roping. On either side of the family compound, two wells pump
up groundwater into large, round, open tanks. For years, the tanks
have been labeled "For livestock use only," but some people in the
area still haul drinking water from them. "We're told not to, but I
know some people who still do because it tastes better," Rangel
says. Both wells were recently tested by the DiNeh project - a
partnership between the tribe, the University of New Mexico and the
Southwest Research and Information Center - and were found to
exceed Navajo EPA and U.S. EPA standards for uranium in human
drinking water. Rangel's house got indoor plumbing in 1978, but she
says, "I drank (the water) as a girl. I swam in the tanks, both me
and my kids. I don't really think about it. I don't want to start
thinking about it."

Rangel was offered a chance to
participate in a DiNeh health survey. She would have received $15
for doing so, but she declined. Still, she is troubled by questions
about her family's health. "I know a couple of people who died from
breast cancer around here. My older sister died of uterine cancer
in her early 40s. I don't know how much exposure she got. Now,
we're seeing different types of cancer in my generation. I get
migraines. I can't work," she says.

She peers into the
clear, cool water shimmering in the glare of the high desert. The
water looks inviting.

"I wouldn't let my kids swim in
there now."]]>No publisherMiningArticleA patienthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/371/17717
Kathleen Tsosie, who has devoted her life to helping
others, now faces the frightening possibility that her breast
cancer has returned. She had hoped the cancer was behind her,
even though she faces another five to seven years of treatment with
tamoxifen, a drug given to prevent estrogen from binding to mammary
cells. "In our community, cancer is a death sentence," says Tsosie,
who was diagnosed a year ago, when she was 47. "People think you
don't recover. Now I find out you survive. You want to live when
that word cancer comes around. When I first heard I had cancer, I
thought it was a mistake. Then I flipped out. I thought, "Oh my
God, who is going to take care of my children and grandkids?' ...
So many things go through your mind. I have to do this, accomplish
this." She starts to cry quietly.

"Why? You always ask
yourself, "Why?' " Tsosie says, fingering the silver bracelets on
her left arm. Like many breast cancer patients, she is working
through the emotional stages: shock, fear, anger and a desire to
assign blame. Was it pesticide exposure in childhood? Not enough
broccoli, or too many hormone-laced meats? There are many possible
culprits, but for Tsosie, as for many Navajo women, one villain
stands out above all others. "It's obvious the uranium is related
to my cancer," says Tsosie. She grew up in the town of Cove, in the
northeastern corner of Arizona, which was one of the Navajo
Reservation's major uranium-producing areas.

"My auntie
from Tohatchi died from breast cancer," Tsosie recalls. "Our
fathers worked in the mines. My father died from lung cancer when
he was 45. It was the same old stories, the clothes covered with
dust. We grew up in the mountains. We drank that cold water from
the mine, had picnics right there, played in the tailings. We
didn't know what it was. We thought it was just a pile of dirt."

Navajo Nation council delegate Phil Harrison, who is
Tsosie's cousin, also grew up near Cove. "Mine waters seeped into
the arroyos, and contamination sat there for decades," he says. "I
would say all the water in the area was contaminated. It's finally
getting cleaned up."

The cleanup is due to the efforts of
Harrison, Tsosie and other activists. Even before her diagnosis,
Tsosie campaigned against a proposal by Hydro Resources Inc. to
open a uranium mine near Church Rock and Crownpoint. As a member of
Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, she's testified before
state representatives, made videos and given press interviews. She
lobbied the Navajo Nation to pass its landmark ban on uranium
mining in 2005.

Many traditional Navajos consider breast
cancer to be a taboo subject, but Tsosie, a school administrator
and the president of the Shiprock agency school board, is willing -
even eager - to talk about it. "I don't think it's so difficult to
talk about breast cancer," Tsosie says. "It's better that people
know about our health, our life. It's a waking call." Tsosie still
has a mother to take care of, as well as her children and
grandchildren. "I've helped so many people," she says. "I don't
deserve this."]]>No publisherMiningArticleThe Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washingtonhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/284/15040
Stewart and Mo Udall were Western conservation giants. Now
the West looks to their sons to bridge today’s social and
political divides and create a conservation legacy of their
ownTheir fathers were Western conservation giants. Can the younger Udalls bridge today's social and political divides and leave their own legacy?

A few years ago, Brad Udall rafted the Colorado River though the Grand Canyon with his Uncle Stewart and a bunch of his cousins. It was like old times, when the Udalls would pack up the station wagons and head into the remote heart of the West. In the evenings, Uncle "Slu" presided over the campfire.

The last night on the river, at mile 220, the former secretary of the Interior recalled the challenges he faced turning swaths of canyon country into national parks, and he reflected on how peaceful it always felt to be in the Grand Canyon. "In my mind, he was very pensive about the canyon. He spoke of its enduring beauty and of just how small we humans are," says Brad. "Stewart talked about how this was his last trip in the canyon, and we all in unison yelled, ‘NO!’ "

It wasn’t his last visit: The elder Udall went back to the canyon last spring, at age 84. He hiked 10 hours up the Bright Angel Trail, and rewarded himself with a martini at the top. It’s pretty much the way he’s always operated: with doggedness, a sense of fun and a degree of audacity. It’s a style shared by many Udalls, branching over two generations.

Stewart and his brother Mo (officially Morris) shepherded the region’s conservation movement beginning in the 1950s. They also fathered a posse of civic-minded Udalls — 12 children between them — who have influential roles today. A liberal dynasty, the family has been called the Kennedys of the West, minus the money.

Most remarkably, Stewart’s son, Tom, and Mo’s son, Mark, are congressmen, representing the districts surrounding Santa Fe, N.M., and Boulder, Colo., respectively. Both are very active in supporting John Kerry’s bid for the White House. Both are also fighting for the preservation of public lands and a balanced, enlightened economic future in the West.

In jest, they call themselves the "Udall Caucus" or the "Coyote Caucus." But the act Tom and Mark are trying to follow is dizzying: Stewart served three terms as an Arizona congressman, followed by eight years as Interior secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Mo was elected again and again to represent Arizona for 30 years in the House, the last half of which he chaired the powerful Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. Together, Stewart and Mo helped push through Congress the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act and the National Seashore Act. They created at least four national parks, six national monuments, 56 wildlife refuges and 20 historic sites. Their crowning achievement was the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which protected 100 million acres of mountains, coasts and forests. At one fell swoop, it doubled the size of the national park system and tripled the size of the wilderness system. As testament to the brothers’ all-encompassing vision, the easternmost and westernmost points in the United States bear the name Udall Point.

Tom and Mark occupy spots on the same congressional committee on which their fathers served. Now called simply the House Resources Committee, it oversees critical decisions about the West’s land and resources. In the event of a future Democratic presidential victory, it’s possible a Udall could once again wield tremendous power as secretary of the Interior.

But in the span of just one generation, the Udalls have become a metaphor for the plight of Democrats and environmentalists in the West. Their fathers had roots in the rural, traditional West, while Mark and Tom are confined to the more liberal ghettos: they represent New West districts dominated by high-tech firms, art galleries, lifestyle seekers and rock-climber wanna-bes.

Observers can’t help comparing the younger Udalls to their fathers, and for Mark and Tom, the expectations are alternately inspiring and frustrating. They’ve inherited a changed world, one in which Congress is no longer friendly to sweeping environmental ambitions. Between a regional Western delegation that leans heavily to starboard and an administration whose idea of economic development resides underground in oil and gas deposits, it would seem that the dreams of Stewart and Mo lie mostly dormant.

But there are also seeds of hope in a family long driven by headstrong optimism and a sense of adventure.

It’s impossible to tell the story of the Udall clan without tracking the political history of the region. When Stewart first joined Congress in 1954, Democrats were the norm: The party controlled the House of Representatives for the next 40 years, and the Senate for 34 of those years. But by the time Tom and Mark were elected in 1998, Democrats were a barely visible minority in the Western delegation.

What happened in the intervening years was a complex, seismic shift of political ground, with the gradual demise of extractive industries, which was often blamed on environmentalists; the fading of the labor bloc that voted Democratic; and the rise of divisive cultural issues like civil rights, guns and gays. The geography of population growth was also a factor, as once-populist farmers and ranchers gave way to new and often conservative suburban immigrants.

The Udalls’ blend of charisma, principle and political astuteness was born on the frontier. In 1851, David Udall, a teetotaling immigrant, came from England to join the Mormons; he ended up in Nephi, Utah. In 1871, the church sent his son, David King Udall, to settle the remote piñon scrubland around tiny St. Johns, Ariz. David King Udall became a farmer and a bishop, and was a polygamist who had three wives and 15 children. One child, Levi Udall, earned a law degree by correspondence course and eventually became a chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. He fathered Stewart in 1920 and Morris in 1922.

The two tall, rangy brothers grew up facing tough challenges in those small-town days: suspicious locals, who were mostly Hispanic Catholics, and an arid climate hostile to farming. Levi made his sons run the farm when they were still teenagers. But he gave them a lot of leeway when it came to questioning Mormon doctrine and formulating their own beliefs. Both sons internalized their father’s work ethic and his drive toward leadership. They were also influenced by their mother, Louise, a schoolteacher and writer who later advocated Native American causes.

Despite having lost his right eye in a childhood accident, Mo became a basketball star in high school and at the University of Arizona. Stewart also played university basketball, and completed a two-year Mormon mission in New York and Pennsylvania. Both served in the military, learned to fly, and traveled the world. Stewart saw combat as a gunner during World War II. Mo commanded a black unit, an experience that led to his further rejection of church doctrine, which at the time said blacks couldn’t be priests, and to his strong support of civil rights. Both Udalls returned to law school in Tucson, and then practiced law together, until Stewart won his congressional seat. When Stewart was appointed John F. Kennedy’s Interior secretary in 1961, Mo ran for the vacant seat and won.

Although neither Stewart nor Mo was an active member of the Mormon church, some of its teachings influenced them, according to Mo’s son Randy. "They had a sense of the land as a foundation ... its beauty and its limits, and a belief in stewardship. There’s a strain, too, of the Mormon belief that, no, it’s not every man and woman for themselves. Somebody had to go back and relieve the snowbound handcart brigades (of Mormon immigrants). You don’t just hang people out to dry or freeze."

The elder Udalls’ political style was ambitious yet practical. As a congressman, Stewart backed the construction of the interstate highway system, which encouraged sprawl but improved trade and defense. Mo knew he had to represent his constituents on issues like water development, which they were for, and organized labor, which they opposed — the latter a position that hurt him in his bid for the presidency in 1976. But he was also an advocate of civil rights, which didn’t help him at home, and an early opponent of the Vietnam War, a stand that angered Stewart’s new boss, Lyndon Johnson.

Stewart and Mo Udall reached across the aisle to work with powerful Republicans like Sen. Barry Goldwater, who helped them push for Arizona wilderness protection. They tackled thorny Native American issues, and succeeded in creating religious and burial site protections, improving child welfare, and crafting water-rights settlements. Egged on by Wallace Stegner, a special assistant in the Interior Department, Stewart wrote an influential book, The Quiet Crisis, in 1963, about the need for conservation.

With the elder Udalls, "the West popped its buttons with pride. Partly because they had the courage to lead," says former nine-term Democratic Rep. Pat Williams of Montana. "They had the vision and foresight to see that the West’s economy was in transition, that these hills were the brows of America’s final hills. That wasn’t obvious 30 or 40 years ago, that most of the land was used up.

"The Udalls came from the last era of Westerners who talked ‘Western’ to Congress," adds Williams. "Now, Westerners just talk right-wing."

Silver-belt-buckled Mo, in particular, was charming, funny and well-liked. He used to memorize the Congressional Directory and greet every member with an anecdote or question about some personal interest. He compiled four notebooks of jokes that he studied and used repeatedly. He’d heard Williams liked to play golf.

"What’s your handicap?" asked Williams.

"Well," responded Udall, "I’m a one-eyed Mormon liberal from Arizona. How’s that for a handicap?"

One of the few national leaders currently from the West, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, attributes some of his success to Mo Udall. Mo pioneered issues that McCain later took up; Mo enacted the first campaign finance reforms since the Truman era, and changed the entrenched seniority system in Congress. McCain supported Mo’s Arizona wilderness bills, and today he’s pushing to curb greenhouse gases. But more than that, McCain admired Udall’s ability to deflate partisan hostilities through humor, courtesy and common sense. In his memoir, Worth the Fighting For, McCain writes, "I loved Mo Udall ... the most widely respected man in Congress."

Mo Udall came down with Parkinson’s disease, resigned from Congress in 1991 and died in 1998. Stewart shifted his public-service focus to challenging the government’s exploitation of Navajo uranium miners. These days, he offers his son the congressman advice on designating wilderness.

With the loss of Mo and other prominent Western Democrats, including Idaho Sen. Frank Church and Montana’s Mike Mansfield (the Senate majority leader from 1961 to 1977), the region’s political clout diminished. Williams compares it to the decline of Southern leadership following the civil rights movement. The Southern pols stayed in office, but dug in their heels against change, and therefore lost respect and power. Today, Williams says, most members of the Western delegation are digging in against the tide of conservation and restoration, instead favoring short-term gain for special interests.

"Western elected officials are missing it," says Williams, now a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana in Missoula. "I know for a fact that they are being downgraded in the eyes of their peers as provincial and petty."

Congressman Mark Udall’s bustling suburban office shows how the arc of the generations has spanned fundamental changes in the region. In the mall and cul-de-sac sprawl halfway between Denver and Boulder, he shares a nondescript building with a yellow fever vaccination center, a small-business accountant and a structural engineer. In the neighborhood are a Korean barbecue, a maker of wood drums, and something called a "liquid spa." Milling about the reception area are a film crew and a delegation of Sudanese refugees.

"My district is the New West," Mark Udall says unabashedly.

The lanky, bushy-eyebrowed 54-year-old bears a marked resemblance to his father. In his office are testaments to Mo’s successes and to his own, including a 1976 Udall-for-President poster (Mo came in second to Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination), photos of Mark and Mo scouting a rapid on the Yampa River, and Mark on a 40-day ski across Alaska’s Brooks Range.

Mark and his cousin, Tom, both grew up in a far larger world than their fathers did, living partly in the Washington, D.C., area and partly in Tucson. As kids, they traveled to cut ribbons, lay wreaths, dedicate monuments and check out future parks. Their parents encouraged them to forge their own identities, but the family’s creation tale was never far from the minds of the younger Udalls.

Mark earned a degree in American civilization studies from Williams College in Massachusetts, but fell in love with Colorado’s high country during an Outward Bound course. A branch of the family had roots in the state: His mother, Pat, who divorced Mo in 1966, had been raised in Estes Park and eventually settled in Boulder. Mark is a climber, hiker and kayaker, and made the outdoors his career, working 20 years at the Colorado Outward Bound School, first as an instructor and ultimately as director. He married Maggie Fox, an attorney for the Sierra Club.

"My dad was very nonjudgmental," recalls Mark, "but he basically said to me, ‘Bring what you’re learning out there in the wilderness and be of use to society.’ "

Mark began his political career by winning a seat in the 1997 Colorado Legislature. Then the 2nd Congressional District seat came open with the retirement of Democratic Rep. David Skaggs. The district, which extends from Boulder and suburban Denver into the mountain resorts along Interstate 70, had also been a stonghold of former Democratic Sen. Tim Wirth, back when he was a representative. Still, Mark faced an extremely close race in 1998, barely beating Boulder’s moderate Republican mayor, Bob Greenlee. In the two elections since, helped by his incumbency, he has won easily.

Tom Udall, now 56, earned his undergraduate degree at Arizona’s unconventional Prescott College, then studied law in Cambridge, England, and at the University of New Mexico. He married a fellow lawyer, Jill Cooper, and stayed in New Mexico, where the family has more roots: His grandmother was born in Luna. He lost two congressional races, in 1982 and 1988, then lowered his sights and won an election as the state’s attorney general. Finally, in 1998, he won the 3rd District congressional seat, a solidly Democratic district that was Bill Richardson’s springboard into becoming Energy secretary under President Clinton and today, New Mexico’s governor.

Representing their left-leaning districts, Mark and Tom have earned 100 percent and 95 percent ratings from the League of Conservation Voters, respectively. They are some of the strongest supporters of wilderness in Congress, and they offer articulate opposition to many Bush administration proposals, such as drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Caring about the environment is part of the moral compass they inherited, and it steers their vision of a balanced, healthy West. "Mark and I would like to try to build back to where we were with our fathers’ generation," says Tom.

Still, the accomplishments of the Coyote Caucus are relatively modest so far, in part due to the fact that Democrats are the minority in Congress. Tom has helped add land to New Mexico’s wilderness areas, boost preventive health care for Native Americans, grease the federal acquisition of New Mexico’s 95,000-acre Baca Ranch, and is helping to create the Long Walk National Historic Trail, commemorating the 1863 forced relocation of Navajos and Apaches to New Mexico’s Fort Sumner.

Mark has helped create the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge on the site of the old nuclear weapons plant, protect 40,000 acres around James Peak as wilderness, and pay claims to sick uranium miners. Other bills he’s sponsored haven’t gone anywhere, including attempts to clean up abandoned hardrock mines, treat wastewater from coalbed methane production, and resolve contentious road right-of-way issues on public land.

Both cousins oppose opening sensitive public lands to oil and gas development, and both are fighting to hold onto the heart of the Endangered Species Act. They have watched Congress repeatedly de-fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act their fathers helped enact.

The younger Udalls point to a poisonous atmosphere in Congress that makes it difficult to achieve the bipartisan successes of their fathers’ day. They lament not just the loss of Democratic power, but the loss of civility overall. "Congress is a different place than I learned about," says Tom. "This administration has abandoned bipartisanship on environmental issues across the board, and has catered to large corporate interests across the board."

So what’s a frustrated Udall to do? Two choices: work within Congress the best way he can, with those genetic gifts of height, affability and humor, or hightail it for other political offices.

So far, Mark and Tom Udall are taking the former course, and seeking re-election this November. Both are expected to win easily.

Mark says mountaineering has taught him useful skills for Congress, like how to keep focused on a goal, how to put your head down and persevere, how to delay gratification, and how to flatten your own ego to work with a team.

Like his Dad, he studies humor and uses it effectively. He keeps a pair of his father’s size 15 basketball sneakers in his office to amuse visitors and to remind himself of the big shoes he’s expected to fill. When a reporter asked him why he wanted to be a congressman, he replied that he had lost so many brain cells at high altitude that he might as well run for office. He keeps a copy of his dad’s joke notebooks, and likes to call upon his favorites.

Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who has put in 28 years in Congress, once asked Mark if attempting to climb Mount Everest was the hardest thing he’d ever done. "Running for Congress was the hardest thing I ever did," Mark replied.

Mark and Tom also work hard to build strategic relationships across the political spectrum — the old Udall style — but with a new and necessary layer of collaboration-speak. "In my Dad’s day, there was a feeling that you voted for a person, not a party. Now the parties have more sway," Mark says. "Sometimes I think I’m a throwback to another era, when you fought hard during the day and socialized together at night.

"We’ve got to work together," Mark says. "You can’t demonize a constituency. We’re all grabbed by something here (in the West). Some of it’s myth, some is reality — the light, the land, the shape of the sky, the enormous sense of possibility. I’m trying to ... integrate the New West and the Old West. We need to maintain big open landscapes and give traditional rural communities a fair shake. Our basic challenges are water, making a living, and respecting Mother Nature."

"The great thing about the Udalls," says Pam Eaton, program director and former regional director of The Wilderness Society, "is they both know that, to help us realize this vision (of a West thriving on conservation), they need to work with everyone, and be open to new ideas and to new ways of bringing people together in a nonthreatening way."

She points to Tom Udall’s proposed 11,000-acre Ojito Wilderness bill (HCN, 1/19/04). It had to face Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., chair of the House Resources Committee, a property-rights crusader who earned a 5 percent rating last year from the League of Conservation Voters. Last May, Pombo wrote a letter to committee members who hoped to move wilderness bills, in what appeared to be a direct and ominous reference to the Mo Udall-Alaska lands era: "The days of designating wilderness in a Member’s District against his or her wishes are a black mark on the record of this Committee, and on my watch, they are over."

The Ojito bill made it out of Pombo’s committee on Sept. 22 — the first wilderness bill to do so since Pombo became chairman in 2002. To pull this off, Tom Udall enlisted the co-sponsorship of his fellow New Mexico representative, Republican Heather Wilson, and made sure the Senate version also had bipartisan support from New Mexico’s Sen. Pete Domenici, R, and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D. The proposal itself is relatively small, on land that is uncontested by industry. If it passes the full House and the Senate, though, it will be the state’s first new wilderness in 17 years.

Mo Udall earned his power by staying put, election after election, and eventually chaired his committee for 14 years. Mark and Tom hold very safe seats, ones they could likely have "for life," as one pundit put it. But the frustrations of Congress are many, and the lure of a more powerful office is strong.

Can they extend their loyal base beyond their liberal districts in a run for governor or senator? Unlike the elder Udalls, Mark and Tom cannot point to a small-town pedigree to help them straddle conservative and liberal interests. What they can point to, of course, is the Udall name. It helps.

Tom Udall’s district incudes not only upscale Sante Fe, but also conservative farming towns like Farmington and Clovis. Half his constituents are Native American or Hispanic. He still lists his religious affiliation as Mormon. Tom "is a natural for (statewide) office," says New Mexico pollster Brian Sanderoff.

But Gilbert St. Clair, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, wonders if Tom has connected well enough with his conservative and rural constituents. "He has been responsive to the concerns of the environmentalists. But that is not something that plays well with his Hispanic constituents. They want to be able to cut timber; they want to be able to graze cattle on public lands."

Mark Udall says he will be considering two statewide races: the governorship of Colorado in 2006, and Wayne Allard’s Senate seat, expected to open in 2008. He briefly jumped into the race this year for the seat of retiring Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, but pulled back after his friend and senior Democrat, Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, announced his candidacy. His withdrawal was interpreted by some observers as a sign of party leaders’ doubts that he could win a statewide race. Still, he’s considered a rising star by others, and landed a speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.

"I believe, with his outdoor roots and his long-standing Western family ties, that he has appeal beyond just the progressive communities in Colorado," Eaton says. "He has ... a kind of credibility with his peers and the public ... (He’s) still open-minded. He has an ability to connect genuinely with people on a personal level that is remarkable." Plus, he appears in television ads wearing climbing gear and shorts, a look many Coloradans aspire to.

That’s not enough for Eagle County Commissioner Tom Stone, whose territory includes the resort town of Vail. He says that Mark Udall "listens to his constituents in Boulder and not in Eagle County." He recently clashed with Udall over a Bush administration bill that would limit legal appeals for logging beetle-killed timber.

But while both cousins have their detractors, there are many who — partly out of nostalgia — think either would make a strong Interior secretary if a Democrat is elected president. And while Washington, D.C., has changed in recent years, there may yet be a place for a grand Western conservation vision — witness Bruce Babbitt, another Arizonan Interior secretary, who helped persuade President Clinton to protect millions of acres in new national monuments.

Ever the optimist, Mark Udall sees a growing constituency for conservation across political divides. "Economic interests will make clear their support for clean water and muscle-powered recreation," he predicts. He points to regional collaboratives working on alternative energy and transportation issues and to the land-trust movement, and says, "It may be Congress is following more than leading right now."

Florence Williams writes from Helena, Montana.

]]>No publisherPolitics2004/10/11 15:55:00 GMT-6ArticleThe Udall bloodline is consistenthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/284/15052
Mo Udall’s six children, and Stewart Udall’s
six – not to mention many of their cousins – have
tended to find work in some form of public serviceThrow a stick around the West’s public offices and institutions, and the odds are decent you’ll hit a member of the extended Udall clan. Joining Mark Udall and Tom Udall in Congress is their second cousin, Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican descended from David K. Udall’s second plural wife. Two other Udall cousins, Chris and Stephen, ran on opposite tickets when Arizona was granted a new congressional seat in 2000. Stephen, the Democrat, was a longtime county prosecutor; Chris, the Republican, was an aide to U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth. Both lost in primaries.

The six children of Mo Udall, along with Stewart Udall’s six, mostly work in various forms of public service.

One of Mo’s sons, Randy, inherited the Udall bishop gene: The gospel he spreads is renewable energy. He’s run the nonprofit Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), based in Aspen, Colo., for 15 years. CORE has persuaded the locals to shoulder a renewable energy mitigation tax, which essentially says that if Aspenites want to heat their driveways, fine, but to compensate for the energy use, they have to pay extra to retrofit public buildings with green power. So far, the tax has generated $2.5 million. Another CORE program brings wind power to 2,500 homes.

Randy sees the region and the adjacent Great Plains as the country’s windshed: "We can produce 200 gigawatts in North Dakota, more than 200 times the full output of Glen Canyon Dam." That dam, built during his Uncle Stew’s reign as Interior secretary, drowned a pristine Utah canyon and choked the ecosystem in the Grand Canyon.

Another of Mo’s sons, Brad Udall, worked as a Grand Canyon river guide, and now directs the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment program, where he helps communities assess their water needs. Brad, along with sisters Anne and Dodie, joined his father on the 1976 presidential campaign trail. He also remembers the time he spent as a child with his father, the congressman.

"I used to love going to D.C. and hanging out in his office," Brad says. "There was a lot going on," including President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979, and his father’s push for preservation of Alaska wilderness.

Brad Udall’s sister, Anne, lives in North Carolina and administers a program that takes local community leaders into the wilderness. She recalls family trips with her father and her Uncle Stewart down the Middle Fork of Idaho’s Salmon River, hiking with her father up Arizona peaks, and childhood visits with her mother to national parks and Indian reservations. "I didn’t spend as much time with (Mo) as I’d have liked, but I adored him," she says. "Somehow I did get it — that love of the land."

Today, she’s on the board of directors of the federally funded Morris K. Udall Foundation, which operates out of the University of Arizona. Through the foundation, 55 college students receive grants each year to pursue environmental studies. The foundation also funds congressional internships for Native Americans and helps resolve disputes through its International Center for Environmental Conflict Resolution.

Most of the rest of Mark and Tom’s siblings are educators, or work in the nonprofit sector. One is a poet, one an environmental lawyer, and nearly all of them like to spend time in the outdoors. The bloodline extends down to Brady Udall, a great-nephew of Stewart and Mo, who is the author of The Miracle Life of Edward Mint, a 2001 novel about a half-Apache orphan raised by Mormons.]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryColoradoRenewable EnergyPolitics2004/10/11 15:00:00 GMT-6ArticleIt's more than a house, it's a fantasy lifehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/238/13539
The sales pitch for the Silver Bow Club, a gated ranch
community proposed for Montana's Big Hole River, weighs 12 pounds
and encourages vivid lifestyle fantasies.Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story.

The sales pitch weighs 12 pounds, arriving in a field bag made of beautiful distressed leather that looks well broken-in. Open the bag and there are maps that appear wrinkled and old, a pretend Montana newspaper clipping that looks historic, and four overdesigned books that also have the feel of rich heritage.

It's all intended to persuade you to buy into the Silver Bow Club, a gated ranch community proposed for the banks of Montana's Big Hole River. The price of a club membership, which includes a share in the club's lodges and a homesite, runs $1.75 million or more. So the sales pitch, delivered to prospective buyers around the country, strives to be impressive.

Open the kit and you practically smell the old money. Except it's not old - you're not buying a homesite so much as an instant pedigree and an instant history that supposedly traces back to rugged, aristocratic forebears. You, the mark, are probably a self-made millionaire careerist who does not come from such a background but wishes you had.

The Silver Bow Club History book, titled with faded gilt-embossed lettering, has fake water stains on its pages. It beckons you to "return to the sense of authenticity" that can still be found in rural Montana.

A hinged, iron-oxide-clad ledger-style book creaks when you open it. Illustrated with sepia-toned watercolors, it describes how the club weaves hunting and fishing into the lifestyle. "Between shots, you flop down in your favorite overstuffed chair, the one that faces the old oil painting on the mantle, and nestle in with a glass of port from your cellar locker ... "

And a leather-bound journal offers the day-to-day experiences of an average member - an elaborately constructed male fantasy. The hypothetical Silver Bow Guy recounts his happy days bagging big game and trout, making deals and watching his children grow up during meaningful vacations on the property. He's both folksy and sophisticated, manly yet sensitive. He writes in loopy script: "I flew three guys from the Stevens account out for opening day of ducks ... one of the guys brought some single malt, which was gone way too quick ... it certainly won't hurt my business any."

The fictional life gets most emotional for the dying days of Buster the Hunting Dog: "I wanted to get Buster out one more time. The arthritis is looking pretty bad. ... This ranch has been his whole life too. It's where he grew up. I didn't want to upset him, so I never let him see my tears."

For the cost of a membership, you, too, may have a mistily remembered dead dog and the lifestyle of well-aged scotch with a view. You can imagine you are a genuine Montanan, as genuine as your handsomely polished designer leather boots.

]]>No publisherCommunities2002/11/11 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBehind the gatehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/238/13512
The Stock Farm outside of Hamilton, Mont., is one of many
new exclusive gated housing developments in the West, and some fear
that these fortified palaces, which cater to a wealthy elite, will
further divide communities and adversely impact the land.The exclusive Fleur de Lis development in Reno, Nev., offers townhomes equipped with lightning-quick Internet access, closed-circuit video monitoring of the kids' playground, and refrigerator bar-code scanners on which residents can order groceries - all in a gated community marketed for its resemblance to "charming Alpine villages of the French Alps."

In Utah, the 900-acre Glenwild residential development, billed as "Park City's premier gated and private mountain community," offers not only golf and snowmobiling, but also aromatherapy and bobsledding. If you're short on cash, the developer recommends a mortgage company that will loan you up to $5 million to buy in.

On the more affordable end, Florentine Estates in Florence, Ore., on 180 wooded acres near the Suislaw River and ocean beaches, offers lots as cheap as $31,000 - "the ultimate manufactured home community on the Oregon coast ... where you can feel the seclusion of a gated community."

Even in the crowded civilization of metro Phoenix, as many as one of every eight people now lives in some form of gated community, according to a recent study.

It's a trend. Twenty years ago, if you ruled out urban high-rises, almost no one in the United States lived in a gated and guarded community. Today, it's hard to pin down an exact total, with so much emphasis on privacy, but experts estimate the U.S. has somewhere between 3,000 and 25,000 gated and guarded communities, and more appear every day.

In this issue, High Country News takes you inside one of the most prominent gated developments closing off pieces of Montana's countryside. We also look at the impacts several developments have on the land and on local communities. And we show how the salesmen operate.

A look into the fortified rural retreats of the West's moneyed elite

Hamilton, Mont. - It's a beautiful day at the Stock Farm. A bright, cloudless sky sends a gentle breeze over the 16th tee. Just down the slope, a family of four mounts their quarter horses for a trail ride to the Elk Viewing Gazebo. Over in the Clubhouse, a woman prepares for her workout on the orbital jogger, and a tan man orders the house lunch specialty: chicken frangelico. It is no doubt the best food in town, but you'll never get to taste it.

For those who can shell out the million-dollar minimum, the Stock Farm offers 95 homesites and 30 cabin lots meticulously arrayed on 2,600 acres, all enclosed by a perimeter fence and gate. The club membership initiation fee alone runs $125,000; raw building sites run as high as $1.2 million; and the cheapest ready-for-move-in residence, a two-bedroom cabin, sells for roughly $800,000.

Money isn't what it's all about, though. In the last few years, half a dozen high-end, gated "shared ranch developments" have begun selling lots along Montana's pristine trout streams and mountain slopes. They attract buyers from out of state by marketing a combination of expansive ranch living, a homogeneous social scene, and convenient property and recreation management. Those who arrive inside the gates are served up a comfortable predictability in their leisure pursuits, all dressed up in tasteful Westernalia. The Stock Farm is where Frontier House meets Sun City.

Outside the gates, it's Western too, but heavily dosed with the realities of early 21st century land use. The farms and working ranches of the Bitterroot Valley roll from its namesake river up to high mountain ranges that shelter wilderness and at least one wandering grizzly bear. An unplanned chaos of ranchettes and rural subdivisions is taking over much of the lowland. Small-town Hamilton, founded on logging and farming, is now sprouting art galleries, a bistro and boxed retail serving a population of nearly 5,000. The scene doesn't look like anyone is in charge.

The presence of a gate for humans in the middle of range country poses the obvious question: Why? Who lives "inside" and who lives "outside," and why underline the demarcation in such an in-your-face way? How does it feel to be on either side of the divide? Since all boundaries are political, this one - an anomaly but also a harbinger - seems worth checking out.

"Almost like a homestead village"

From the eastern edge of town, the Stock Farm slopes gently uphill. A hundred years ago, the land was part of a gigantic horse-breeding ranch owned by copper baron Marcus Daly. One of the horse ranch's legacies, a straight, cottonwood-lined road, leads up to a new stone-pillared electronic gate that is the back door to the Stock Farm. This gate is closed every night, operated by a keypad that requires an access code. During the day a sign is eminently readable: MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY. A ranch manager's house serves as sentry.

Bob Arrigoni, a San Francisco architect who helped draw the Stock Farm's elaborate master plan, meets me just inside the gate, near the well-appointed 48-stall equestrian center and the Stock Farm's fly-fishing shop. Bob also designed Robert Redford's Sundance resort on a Utah mountain and Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas' movie-making complex in the oak hills north of San Francisco.

In his 60s, jovial and gracefully balding, Bob has come to the Stock Farm with his wife, Diane, for a two-week stay in what he disarmingly calls their "so-called cabin."

While she practices casting in a pond, he drives me around in a new SUV. The movie-industry connection makes sense as he explains the Stock Farm's high-concept layout. As the property rises, different "neighborhoods" determine house styles. Both the houses and the habitats are supposed to look traditional, but both have been carefully tinkered with. First we come to the irrigated pasture of the treeless flats, land of the "ranch houses." These residences must conform to strict design guidelines. They must have, for example, a wraparound porch, a muted-tone composite roof, and a white exterior. Each must include a compound of three buildings, since, as Bob explains, outbuildings are traditional for ranches.

"We want to reflect the historical feel; otherwise, it just doesn't read right," says Bob, who also serves on the design-review committee.

But then we drive by a glistening steamship-sized job with copper cupolas. At first, I think it must be the clubhouse, but it's just Lot 15 and a 21,000-square-foot house. Built by a Chicago developer, it sheaths an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a 75-foot-long tunnel for target practice, a room-sized, hammered-copper-topped, horseshoe-shaped bar, a home theater and a multi-car garage dressed up as a barn.

It doesn't "read" quite like the frontier, and Bob knows it. "Some of these things down here," he says, waving an arm across the flats, "the design committee is less than happy about."

Bob is eager to head uphill, toward the Nick Fazio-designed golf course and the "mountain homes" that surround it. The mountain homes vary from large to very, very large. Styled like historic national-park lodges, they must be built of hand-hewn logs perched on granite foundations, and they feature big chimneys, log tresses and oversized entry porticos.

Onward, east of the pool and tennis courts, we come to the cabins. Clustered tightly together - "almost like a homestead village," says Bob - the cabins range from 2,000 to 4,500 square feet, with as many as six bedrooms.

We stop at Bob's cabin. Like much of the Stock Farm architecture, it is very masculine, with massive logs and dark wallpaper and enormous leather-and-tapestry furniture, designed to make one feel both very small and very big at the same time. Lampshades, predictably, are covered in bark, while the side tables are draped in cowhide that looks more Vermont Holstein than Montana Angus.

All the cabins' interiors materialized effortlessly, installed by the same designer who did the husky furnishings of the Clubhouse, all for a consistent feel. "The place is a little dark," Bob frowns. "I'm going to add a glass door and put in another window or two." If it doesn't feel personal (there are no family photos or bawdy light-switch covers), it's not supposed to. During busy times, most cabins are managed by the Stock Farm as rentals when the owners are gone. Near the kitchen, there's a standard hotel phone and next to it, a listing of guest services.

A ghost ranch

Like Bob Arrigoni, most Stock Farmers hail from far-off urban areas. Most are corporate executives who are "outdoors-oriented," says managing partner Jim Schueler. "This is for a person with a very busy, busy lifestyle and he doesn't want to manage a ranch but wants to be a part of it. Everything is taken care of, so they just have to worry about fishing, hunting and golf."

The marketing is soft-sell, largely by word of mouth. Members tend to show up in geographical packs - a bunch from the Bay Area, other bunches from New Orleans, Texas, Minneapolis and New York.

It's tough to get a handle on the people here, though, because not many are around. So far, about three-fourths of the Stock Farm lots have sold and about one-third have been built upon. But as with Montana's other new gated ranch developments, to call the Stock Farm "residential" would be a misnomer. Only two or three homeowners live here full time. Most just come a few times in the winter and during the relatively short summer golfing season.

In early spring, when the neighboring meadows bustle with calving season and muddy school buses, the Stock Farm is eerily silent. Much of the time, it is a ghost ranch.

Whether or not they are present, Stock Farmers obviously relish a common governing principle: order. Tight control is evident everywhere, from strict codes and regulations to the sense of enclosure with several gated entrances. Unlike most Montanans, who would find it Orwellian, homeowners here are willing to be told what to put in their front yards. They're willing to be told they can't trim dead tree branches or park their vehicles anywhere they want. To do otherwise would be to risk the uncertainties of the unplanned real West. As one buyer puts it, "We looked at properties outside the development, but you never know if next door is going to look like an airplane wreck."

The rules also preserve adherence to a meticulously constructed frontier mythology. Even the maintenance sheds are disguised as quaint red barns. The smooth road asphalt has been layered with a large-aggregate gravel to resemble dirt. More than a thousand ponderosa pine trees have been planted to enhance a sense of wildness.

The development's version of Frontierland subscribes to the triumphalist narrative of Western settlement. Tom Thomas, a semi-retired Californian who's building an 8,000-square-foot ranch compound, explains the rather involved fiction driving the look of his place: "The philosophy is that there was a carriage house there from 150 years ago and a family farmhouse, and the new generation has some money and builds a bigger house next to it. ... The buildings are made to look old."

Only three architects are approved to serve the customers here, and primarily one construction company and one custom log company carry out the designs. One of the anointed architects, Missoula-based Jeremy Oury, specializes in log design. "We're good at replicating authentic details in a modern context," says Oury. To get the appearance of a 100-year-old building, he designs a roof that looks thin and delicate but disguises thick insulation. To make the "homestead" cabins look much smaller than they really are, he builds numerous boxy rooms, each appended with a separate roof line.

The design reviewers, the homeowners' association and the stringent club membership committee control what kind of flowers their neighbors can plant, where those neighbors must put their trash cans and - even through the approval process - who those neighbors will be.

"A whole other life"

It is possible to land your jet at the Hamilton airport and vacation at the Stock Farm for a lifetime, and never set foot on the town's Main Street two miles away. Many Stock Farmers don't shop in the local grocery store, preferring to eat at the club or to have their groceries picked up and delivered by the club's Member Services. As a general rule, they don't participate in the local weed association, school district or county commission meetings that make up the social hum of rural life.

The presence of the gates further disconnects these newcomers and creates a certain amount of resentment.

"It's an affront and a symbol of an attitude that doesn't square with who we are as citizens of this state," says Frederick Skinner, a history professor who drives by the Stock Farm gates twice a day as he commutes to the University of Montana in Missoula, 50 miles north. Skinner adds, "The resentment I feel is part of a larger bag of resentments I haul around about the increasing privatization of the West."

Aspects of the Stock Farm reach back into history. Americans have long balkanized into distinct self-styled communities, from immigrant ghettos to utopian farms. Many of Montana's pioneer ranch empires were financed with British and other foreign capital. Wealthy aristocrats from the East have long been sending their scions to frolic with the cows. But gentleman ranchers in the past tended to mix it up with the locals out of necessity and good will. Sometimes they even became Montana's politicians.

Today's pattern of land ownership represents a significant social upheaval. Of all land sales over 1,000 acres in western Montana last year, 80 percent went to nonresidents, according to one of Montana's leading ranch appraisers. There are now so many well-heeled strangers that they have the mass to form their very own towns, bound by their own codes and regulations and their own self-government.

The Stock Farm "fits into the more general process in the nation of increasing separation by race and class," says University of Montana sociologist Paul Miller. "Those who can purchase their separation increasingly do.

"In my view, it's not a healthy thing for a community to have a gated, defensive structure, and it goes against the concept of a sustainable community, in which people share spaces and a common identity and are attuned to the needs of each other," Miller says. "I don't know who they're afraid of out there, but for those outside the gates, it makes you wonder what's wrong with you that you might be scary to others."

Bob Arrigoni says the much-ballyhooed front gate is merely symbolic, "to signify you've entered a special place." Managing partner Schueler, however, says his buyers expect it. "It comes with the turf," he says. "People from California or Detroit want that sense of security." The most visible Stock Farm gate, on a main highway, is closed 24 hours a day to all those who don't have the access code.

Many of the codeless locals struggle to survive on the low end of the economic hierarchy. Hamilton is the seat of Ravalli County, which has Montana's lowest annual wage. The county's poverty rate is a relatively high 16 percent. The Stock Farm's initiation fee alone is more than five times the average yearly paycheck.

The sense of division is acute. Generally, "The new folks who come into these rural areas tend to be new to their money and still amassing it. They have little time or interest in getting to know who their neighbors are," says John McIlwain, senior researcher for the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute, which tracks land-use trends. The perception, and sometimes the reality, is that exclusive enclaves limit access to public resources, whether by closing a road or gate previously open, by restricting use of streams and trailheads, or by otherwise abusing the public trust.

Despite the fact that Stock Farmers take pains to conceal the houses and golf course from town and to leave a swath of the property undeveloped in an elk-habitat easement, everyone in town knows about the development and how much it costs.

C.J. Sherwood, an earnest 19-year-old who tends bar at the Spice of Life in downtown Hamilton, puts it succinctly: "They have money and we don't. They walk in and you know right away they're from the Stock Farm. They expect the world to wait on them right now, and it's all about them. It's like a whole other life."

Attempts to connect

The Stock Farm does benefit the local community. In addition to increased property taxes, the club pays about a hundred employees, mostly to tend the golf course and serve food and beverages. The club also trains local teens to work as caddies during golf season, and the caddies get to play the course two times each season.

The club is an enormous boon to local contractors, construction workers and artisans. Handmade hinges, railings, stone fireplaces, carved stair treads, rough iron chandeliers and the peeled logs originate locally. One house here will keep a specialist in cabinet knobs busy for months.

And the club shares some of its wealth, by donating to local causes. Since the Stock Farm began three years ago, its management and members have donated more than $140,000 to organizations, including the local YMCA, Special Olympics, 4-H, the library, museums, volunteer fire departments, and local schools, says Matt Guzik, Stock Farm general manager. As a mechanism for the donations, the club recently launched the Greater Ravalli Foundation, specifically to benefit local school-age kids.

"I've worked at other gated communities that were more private, that just shut down the barriers, that didn't get involved in local communities, even fought local communities. We're extremely unique in that way," Guzik says. But even he acknowledges the psychology: "Some people are going to be against a community like this, just because ..."

Perhaps since local needs are so great, the donations seem thinly spread, says Cheryl Kikkert, the director of Healthy Families, a nonprofit coalition of 30 different agencies and groups. "From my own point of view, we don't know (the Stock Farmers) are here. My sense is nobody knows who lives there and that's the way they want it to be."

Some of that separation comes from the locals' own hesitation to approach the Stock Farmers. "I would love to open the golden spigot up there, but we haven't figured how to do it," says Stacey Umhey of Safe, an organization which runs a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She adds, "Like today, we're getting ready for our annual auction, and I'm in jeans and sweaty. I can't imagine sitting down to lunch with Charles Schwab (the California investment magnate who is one of the Stock Farm partners) and asking for money."

During weekend golf tournaments, Stock Farmers make a show of force, as the airspace above town teems with private planes and helicopters, and more Stock Farmers venture into town. "You can spot little coveys of the aristocracy when they decide to go slumming it downtown in tight little packs like foreign tourists," says Larry Campbell, a Hamiltonian and director of a local environmental group with about 750 members, the Friends of the Bitterroot.

"A number of local people are on the construction gravy train up there, but there's a negative side, too," Campbell says. Stock Farmers "are the driving force behind persistent pressure to expand the Hamilton airport, which is very unpopular here."

The airport runway is too short for easy use by most private jets. That's fine with most locals, who complain of aircraft noise and jet fuel odor. They can use the regional airport in Missoula. But for Stock Farmers, using the Missoula airport means less time on the back nine.

"It's fine to have a gated community," says town resident Gwen Haas, a vocal opponent of expanding the Hamilton airport, "but don't come in and say we're going to change the ambiance of the valley for our convenience so we can land closer. Someone should tell them that people live on the ground and that rattling our dishes is not very neighborly."

The elusive simple life

A few Stock Farmers are trying to put down roots in the community. In the Clubhouse, I slump into a fat club chair and chat with a member who's in financial services. Tousled, tan and happy, he's just come off the golf course in preparation for an amateur tournament. He is one of the few who intend to live here full time. At 40 and retired - he sold his business at the top of the market - he's also younger than most. With two kids and one on the way, he says his family will use local public schools and fully integrate into Hamilton.

"We have a lot of friends in the community," he says, "and the (local) kids are the nicest of anywhere I've seen." At the end of the day, his kids can come home and be safe, jump on a horse or ride around in a golf cart.

In its pursuit of perfection, the Stock Farm is not unlike that other happiest place on earth, Disneyland. The Stock Farm is a themed world, too, but not so easy to pin down. The theme is the West, yes, but not the Jeffersonian West of small yeomen farmers laboring toward an egalitarian democracy. Nor is it Turner's West of back-breaking labor to civilize the wilderness and form the American can-do character. But of course, those Wests never really existed, either, or not for long.

What appeals most to the Stock Farmers is the notion they can find here exactly what they lack: a simple life. That is precisely what all those design elements work so hard to convey. The Stock Farm embodies all the contradictions of the modern American West with none of the discomforts; those float downhill beyond the gates.

"We are a lot of simple, low-key people," Bob Arrigoni says as he ferries me across the golf cart path. "We want to be treated like everyone else."

Florence Williams, a former High Country News staff reporter, lives in Helena, Montana.

]]>No publisherCommunities2002/11/11 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMaking buffalo payhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/194/10203
In the Great Plains, some buffalo ranchers are trying to
make the animals pay without turning them into beef cattle
clones.Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story.

Anyone looking at the buffalo ranching industry over the past decade would see signs of both promise and disappointment. In the early to mid '90s, so many ranchers wanted in that the price of "herd stock" - or a starter herd - quadrupled. Ranchers were making so much money selling animals to other ranchers that they plain forgot about selling meat. The North Dakota-based North American Bison Cooperative built up such huge unsold inventories that the federal government bailed them out last year, not exactly good press for a growing industry or for advocates of prairie restoration.

Closely observing these trends was Sam Hurst, a recently arrived South Dakota bison rancher. Hurst was a Los Angeles-dwelling producer for NBC's Today Show who did a story on the Poppers in 1991. He grew so enamored of the Buffalo Commons vision and the work of one dedicated rancher in particular - South Dakota's Dwayne Lammers - that in 1993 he, with his wife and two children, upped and moved to the Black Hills. Now, with rancher Dan O'Brien, he has founded the Wild Idea Buffalo Company, which essentially hand-sells prime cuts of free-roaming, native grass-fed buffalo.

"Why in the world would we want to take a noble, native beast of the Great Plains and put it in feedlots?" he asks. "That's not what gourmet restaurants and cooks are interested in. They already have black Angus. And then all the cost advantages of raising wild animals are lost to you."

Sadly and unnecessarily, Hurst says, about 95 percent of the bison meat sold is feedlot finished. "It strikes me as a violation of the values Frank and Deborah put together," he says. "They imagined restoration. I don't think in their wildest dreams they ever imagined feedlots."

Hurst believes there is an untapped market of consumers who care enough about authenticity and prairie restoration that they will buy his product. One model he seeks to emulate is The Nature Conservancy's Conservation Beef, marketed to high-end restaurants and consumers as natural, eco-friendly meat raised by ranchers who meet conservation criteria.

In 1999, its first in business, Wild Idea sold 34 boxes of various cuts at $255 a box, between double and triple the price of beef, and a price similar to feedlot bison. Last year it sold 85 boxes, and this year it hopes to triple sales with an Internet site and direct marketing. Ultimately, Hurst envisions partnering with other ranchers who agree to strict criteria of raising integrated, stable herds, feeding animals only on native grasses and working to improve the range.

"I see an alliance of ranches working together with some outside capital," Hurst says. "Why not go to Microsoft or Intel who cares about conservation and say, 'look, here's what we need, why don't you underwrite a million dollars of native grass seed?' If a rancher does a conservation easement, we'll re-seed his range. But the whole thing has to hinge on being a successful business. If you're going to re-introduce bison to the Great Plains, you have to sell the meat and you have to make it pay."

]]>No publisherCommunities2001/01/15 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticlePlains sensehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/194/10194
Ten years after Frank and Deborah Popper first proposed
turning depopulated Great Plains counties into a 'Buffalo Commons,'
their once-controversial ideas are getting more respect in the
region as the population continues to decline.When the county-by-county census data for the year 2000 are complete, analysis will reveal bad news for the Great Plains: substantial population loss in rural counties, an aging demographic and declining fertility rates.

Deaths vastly exceed births, schools are closing, their contents auctioned, and families are selling the farm. While rural areas across the U.S. have grown overall, the Great Plains, along with parts of the Mississippi Delta and western Corn Belt, remains uniquely forlorn.

None of this grim news is really new. Rural Plains' counties peaked in 1920 and have lost over half a million people - a third of their population - since then. Remarkably, hardly anybody on the outside noticed, despite the recent quickening of the decline. The region is largely invisible - or was, until a pair of academics named Frank and Deborah Popper came on the scene a decade ago (HCN, 9/26/88, 12/16/91).

Since then, the Poppers have more or less been on a roll, like Wall Street's Motley Fools or analyst Henry Blodgett, who had the good fortune to predict the early rise of Amazon.com. The Poppers are the Faith Popcorns of the Prairie. Not only did their dire prognostications materialize, they actually accelerated due to tanking commodities prices.

"We clearly hit a nerve through luck and common sense," says Frank Popper. "It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this region will continue to de-populate, age and face further economic declines."

Nor did it take a rocket scientist to predict the reaction, which ranged from anger to rage. When the Poppers spoke in Plains towns in the early 1990s, police were often present to protect the couple. The nicest thing they were told in those days was: Go back to New Jersey and solve your state's problems.

Yet this summer, the amiable Poppers rode a manure spreader in a centennial parade down the Main Street of Gwinner, N.D. That the soft-palmed New Jersey academics would ever mount such a machine seems unlikely; that they would do so in a position of honor in a small town on the Great Plains seems nothing short of stupefying. It's been 13 years since the couple first pitched their idea of turning the ailing plains into a vast "Buffalo Commons," a venue for bison and prairie restoration, ecotourism and niche marketing of bison products. Since then, they have gone from being "East Coast academic Martians" (in the words of Frank) to being, well, almost local.

So pervasive is their influence that the term "Buffalo Commons" is now the name of a chamber music society, an enviro-novel, a furniture cabinet store in Oberlin, Kan., a road bypass in Oklahoma City, a birding safari group, a Web design firm, a University of North Dakota adult outreach program, a North Dakota medical heliport, and a North Dakota company specializing in heavy machinery, named by its owners with thumb-nosing irony, but now, significantly, out of business.

"We started off being very threatening," says Deborah Popper, the geographer and number-cruncher of the pair. "People thought we had power, that we were some sort of front for the government. One of the reasons attitudes are changing is that we really did serve some useful function in causing a discussion. People typically thanked us for giving them a wake-up call, even if they disagreed with everything else. Now we're getting invited back. This has been a really busy year."

The Buffalo Commons concept went from a poetic idea (an exalted way to end a paper on regional geographical decline) to an astoundingly publicized provocation to a useful land-use metaphor and back to a poetic idea, one that is haphazardly but undeniably creeping toward reality. Since the Poppers' proposal, buffalo numbers have increased exponentially, to the point where some 300,000 animals now live in North America, mostly on the Plains. Originally, the Poppers suggested a preserve of 130,000 square miles, nearly the size of Montana. While that hasn't happened, today one man alone - Ted Turner - runs bison over an acreage larger than Delaware, and other ranchers have followed suit (see story page 10).

After a few years of relative peace and obscurity in the mid-'90s, the Poppers are back, in full New Jersey regalia, spending lots of time on and talking about the Plains. "This concept has become an intellectual annuity for ourselves," jokes Frank Popper.

Like most of their triumphs over the years, the Poppers' Gwinner parade ride was tinged with ambivalence, complexity and some awkwardness. They came to town in part to watch a local play, a satire called "Professor Prank's Proposal, or Don't Let the Doctor Buffalo You," about a New Jersey professor who drugs the country-folk and then swindles them out of their land for his buffalo herd.

"We just poke fun," says schoolteacher and playwright Dolly Winger. "Out here, we never trust folks from out East."

Winger says that at first she was suspicious of the Poppers, but now agrees with their assessment of decline. "I grew up in a farmhouse north of here built in 1920," says Winger, 54. "Now you can't even tell it was ever there. Nobody goes any more. My father sold the farm to a bigger farm. It's like we never existed."

Meanwhile, there's a cafe in Gwinner (pop. 1,000) that sells buffalo meat. The town even served some up for the centennial picnic.

The Poppers took in the melodrama with good grace and a dose of academic distance. "It struck me as a nice instance of the grassroots cultural penetration of the Buffalo Commons idea," says Frank.

It was Deborah Popper's geographical research that showed huge chunks of the Plains as lacking large hospitals, interstates and nearby retail service centers, chunks that had lost more than half of their residents between 1930 and 1980, where poverty and median age significantly exceed national averages. Seventy-two percent of the Great Plains lost population between 1960 and 1990. Kansas has 6,000 ghost towns, some still warm.

It's Manifest Destiny in reverse.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner both overstated and over-anticipated the closing of the American Frontier. He saw westward migration occurring in orderly yeoman-filled waves, first to the Mississippi River, then to the Rockies and on to California. But if you use Turner's definition of frontier - two people per square mile - all censuses after 1890 show the sparse frontier returning to the Plains. Thousands of disillusioned homesteaders picked up and left. Those who stayed either consolidated the land into larger farms or ranches, or eked out a substandard living.

Demographically, the frontier reversed itself early in the 20th century, making a U-turn east. Kansas has more frontier counties now than a hundred years ago. By 1998 population estimates, 35 of North Dakota's 53 counties meet the frontier definition. Forty-six of them have lost, rather than gained population. The only places that have grown surround metropolitan areas, where rural people are moving for jobs.

Over a third of the Plains' counties - 900,000 square miles - hold fewer than six people per square mile, and nearly half of those counties hold fewer than two people per square mile.

The frontier is not only surviving, it is also expanding at rates unprecedented since the Dust Bowl. If Turner thought taming the frontier helped define American values and character, what does it say about us that we have failed? Did Western communities ever really exist as separate and insulated from urban markets and corporate or federal capital?

Most Americans are so used to grumbling about the problems of growth that we are stunned, and not a little excited, to learn that a fifth of our interior looks post-apocalyptic. In a voyeuristic sort of way, the Great Plains just got interesting. Sparseness and abandonment now seem like a novelty. The Poppers have been doing the most American thing imaginable, turning a reversal into an opportunity: a clean slate for the next new myth.

An evolving metaphor

In Souris, N.D., just shy of the Canada border, no one is in at the Cenex gas station. A bulletin board advertises a "canola risk management meeting" and haircuts for $7. The post office, hardware store, grocery, and cafe all share the same low-slung aluminum-sided, red-roofed building. No one is there, either. This is Bottineau County, which had 17,295 people in 1910. It had 7,241 people, and dropping, in 2000. In the 1990s alone, 10 percent of the county either died or moved. Two counties to the West, Burke County lost 24.5 percent of its population in just a decade.

The change is mostly gradual, but the difference on the land and in the towns is huge, from four homesteading families per square mile, to mile after mile of marginal farmland owned by one aging family or efficiency-minded company. Driving north of Minot and the sustenance of a military installation, one sees increasingly empty roads, derelict farm machinery, tilting, gutted-out farm houses, some still with their hopeful Formica kitchens intact.

Some country roads see so little traffic that tufts of grass sprout in their asphalt center.

It's not that this land is empty; it's that it's post-industrial. Weeds have taken over the road-sides, piles of rusting sheet metal sit in fallow fields, and even the oil derricks have squeaked to a halt. This is the South Bronx of the prairie. To be redeemed, it also needs to be restored.

Ecologically, the Plains are in trouble. Only 40 percent of the northern mixed-grass prairie ecosystem remains, along with 25 percent of the southern mixed-grass prairie, according to Daniel Licht, author of Ecology and Economics in the Great Plains. Only 1 percent of prairie dogs' original habitat survives, and the black-footed ferret, which depends on the prairie dog, is arguably the most endangered mammal in North America. Some experts predict the Ogallala Aquifer will dry up in 20 years. Record amounts of pesticides flow onto the land and into rivers, and substantial soil loss continues despite conservation programs.

North Dakota is the state most tolerant of the Poppers and the Buffalo Commons idea, perhaps because it has suffered the region's most dramatic population losses and financial blows.

With both droughts and floods, the state was declared a federal disaster area in four of the last five years. By the year 2015, a fifth of that state's population will be over age 65. It is not at all hard to imagine bison herds taking over the neighborhood.

"Early on, we might have questioned the Buffalo Commons concept," recalled Zalenski of the Fargo Forum. "In fact, just a few years ago they (the Poppers) were greeted by a lynch-mob mentality. But as the process unfolded and we got into their research, you would have to be as dumb as a stump not to realize they were right on. It's more than just mythological nonsense about buffalo, it's the whole concept that embraces land use of all kinds and points out mistaken land uses."

Mythology aside, bison are, in fact, re-colonizing the Northern Plains. Frank Popper notes that North Dakota's state bank now lends for buffalo ranching ("the lending officer is nicknamed Buffalo Bob"), the extension office hands out booklets on buffalo, and the North Dakota Bison Association's processing plant turns 12,000 animals a year into sausages and steaks. "North Dakota is the leader," he says.

Unthinkable just several years ago, a recent report by the North Dakota state Labor Market Information Center applauded the Poppers' ideas and even suggested that the state consider moving toward a Buffalo Commons.

"The vilified Buffalo Commons idea could be turned on its head, applied in measured degrees, and provide new industry in areas of North Dakota ravaged by the rural exodus ..." said the report. "The Buffalo Commons could fit nicely into a plan to transform our rustic, barren landscape into a natural attraction."

If the Great Plains has evolved toward a clearer, more resigned understanding of its plight, the Poppers' vision, too, has evolved toward a softer, more humane proposal. The couple no longer speaks of federal buy-outs on the Plains, or of massive, communally owned preserves and herds.

"Our thinking became more nuanced as we talked to more people," says Deborah Popper. "Our initial insights were more sweeping. Now there's more room for different solutions."

Indeed, some would say their initial papers were almost nihilistic, positing a worst-case scenario of total community loss with only the occasional safari emerging from the darkness to watch the buffalo.

"We wouldn't do that sort of thing anymore," says Frank Popper. "We've become more responsible, more mature or something."

The Poppers say the Buffalo Commons is still more a metaphor than a prescription. If their language has changed, so has the substance of their concept. "We've learned over the years to be more sensitive and to write more carefully, avoiding words like "empty" and trying to qualify it when we say, 'Your ancestors made mistakes.' Now we say they were responding to the incentives of their time and doing the best they could."

Moreover, their Buffalo Commons no longer resembles a government-run human relocation scheme, where buffalo totally replace people. "We now see the federal government as unreliable," says Frank Popper, not to mention a political liability in rural America. "Now," he says, "we see the effort as largely taken up by private groups, NGOs, states, provinces and tribal groups with room for all sorts of possibilities."

"We're not against keeping people on family farms," reasons Deborah Popper. "It's just that it's so difficult for the Plains to maintain a population base. What's attracting people to it? Where's the jobs? Young people can't afford to go into farming even if they wanted to, and most don't."

"It's a done deal"

While a few remaining detractors tire of what they see as the Popper's we-told-you-so smuggery, most everyone admits they are impressed by the concept's Velcro-like properties. Still, it's one thing to point out the now-obvious problems of the region and another to espouse a large-scale ecological solution. The Poppers have come a long way since the days when police patrolled their speaking engagements, but no, the Great Plains is not yet wholly ready to offer up its farms and ranches to a giant buffalo range.

Frank Popper, through sheer logic, humor and persuasion, keeps the heat on. He speaks with a casual matter-of-factness about a vague, inevitable future in bison.

Last April, he went to Lincoln, Neb., as a guest of the Center for Great Plains Studies, appearing amid the Wranglers and cowboy boots in a purple button-down shirt and chinos. Before addressing a Popper-friendly conference on bison, he spoke to a graduate-level range management course at the University of Nebraska. This is a challenging group, full of plaid shirts, farm-machinery baseball caps and work boots. A sign above the water fountain outside the third-floor classroom reads: "Please do not spit tobacco in the sink."

Frank Popper speaks fast and gets to the point quickly. "I'm delighted to still talk about the Buffalo Commons, because intellectually, it's a done deal. The idea has serious legs, and it's going to happen as far as we are concerned. The question is how."

Predictably, some postures shift, as people seem to ask, Who does this guy think he is? "The people here will find their own solutions," retorts one woman."

Popper: "Yes, the people are resilient and stalwart" - he doesn't say "blah blah blah" but you can tell he's heard this argument many times before - "but for many, the solution seems to be in buffalo. The Plains' resourcefulness actually fits this. They are going to buffalo. It's already happening."

Another student, so blond and thin she looks born of wheat: "If there aren't farmers and ranchers here, we'll have to import food."

Popper's response is typically to the point: "We already do. To say we're America and we produce food doesn't cut it anymore. I hate to say it, but it's true. It played in 1940, 1950, 1970, but it doesn't play anymore. I have complete sympathy that there's value in this way of life. The Buffalo Commons is an out-of-the-box attempt to preserve those values."

When someone argues that the Plains are a great place to live, that people are bound to come and start new businesses, Popper lays out more blunt news:

"Americans, on the whole, don't see the Great Plains as a very attractive place. They will go to places with trout streams and mountains. They don't go to western Kansas. I don't see it happening."

The students look glum. These are the ones who didn't go off to San Jose or choose a major in liberal arts, business or foreign affairs. They are putting years and dollars into being Nebraska's next food producers. Buffalo burgers are not what they have in mind.

Down the hall, Popper stops in at an ag sciences faculty lunch discussion. He starts out by speaking of the region's "permanent" instability.

"The Plains were settled less securely than governments or societies are willing to admit. There's been a slow population leak here for a hundred years," he says. The Great Plains have suffered repeated large economic and social collapses since European settlement, beginning in the 1880s with the heartbreaking inadequacies of the 160-acre homestead policy, followed by the 1930s drought and depression, and now the agricultural collapses of the 1980s and '90s. Such regional decline is not a historical singularity, notes Popper. It happened, for instance, in post-Erie Canal New England after 1830, which rebounded to become a conservation stronghold.

His listeners are as dismissive as their students, but more articulate.

"What you would call de-population I would call production-rate efficiency," says James Specht, a professor of agronomy.

Popper's not buying. "The contradictions in the land of increased efficiency stick out like a sore thumb. What about declining water tables, dying towns?"

Specht: "You can only have so many Westins and so many tourists looking at so many bison."

Popper shrugs. These are details for others to work out. A planner by discipline, Popper is more interested in big-picture trends, projections and possibilities. "Plan A has not worked. It's time to look at Plan B."

Beyond bison

The Indians, ranchers, humanists and scientists at Lincoln's bison conference see a future for the region not in continued corporatization but in restoration, both of native ecosystems and of native cultures. The Poppers are icons in this crowd, but the two-day conference agenda also illustrates how far beyond the Poppers the restoration vision has traveled.

"In the '80s, the Poppers basically hit all these white people on the head with a two-by-four with this idea," says geographer and Rosebud Sioux member Edward Valandra. "Way back when, they were onto something really powerful that resonated really well with us. When I first heard them, I thought maybe the ghost dancers' prophecy of the returning buffalo might be coming true."

Several years ago, Valandra sought out the best place to run a large, inter-tribal bison herd. He looked at such county indicators as populations' average ages, degree of soil erosion, long-term population loss, and low agriculture income, and he ultimately proposed a 2.2 million-acre zone in the Bad River area of southwestern South Dakota.

Does Valandra's bison vision have room for Ted Turner? Here Valandra is circumspect. "I think bison restoration has room for a lot of people. Turner is a man of many contradictions. Remember, he owns the Atlanta Braves, the team with the tomahawk chop."

Although regional tribes have not acted on Valandra's proposal, their own herds are growing. The InterTribal Bison Cooperative supports 50 tribes and 10,000 bison, a six-fold increase since 1992. The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes, for example, run a herd of about 600 bison on Montana's Fort Belknap reservation. The animals are used for meat, trophy hunts and ceremonial and educational purposes. The same tribes are reintroducing black-footed ferrets on the bison range in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (HCN, 12/8/97).

The Nebraska bison-fest also yields the Poppers' most thoughtful critics, and shows how complicated the nitty-gritty of ecological restoration really is. Many bison advocates and scientists bemoan the rise of domesticated bison herds.

Treating bison as managed livestock, rather than as free-roaming and free-breeding herds, can jeopardize both genetic health and the condition of the range. Confined bison may overgraze a patch of grass just as hard as cattle (HCN, 6/8/98). Moreover, nearly all the counties the Poppers identified as distressed and, therefore, likely bison-range candidates, lie within the same short-grass ecosystem type. Setting those counties aside for restoration wouldn't accomplish much in terms of preserving diverse prairie ecosystems, according to Plains economist Licht.

In other words, bison may be sexy, but they're not necessarily a magic bullet for saving the Plains. Mark Guizlo, an environmental historian at Montana State University, for example, thinks that a better future on the Plains - bison or no bison - is impossible without first enacting fundamental changes in agriculture policies. He'd like to see a shift from corporate domination toward a more culturally and environmentally sustainable model.

And although The Nature Conservancy runs over 3,000 head of bison on 80,000 acres of grassland, working with cows can be just as effective a tool for conservation.

"As it is, we do way more prairie conservation with cattle people than with bison people," says Al Steuter, director of science and stewardship for The Nature Conservancy's Nebraska office. "Given land ownership patterns and conservation priorities, there are places where cattle is a more appropriate tool. Our best strategy is to give the people who own the land now - cattle people - tools and incentives they need to conserve public values. The Poppers' vision is culturally and aesthetically driven, but it's not necessarily scientifically driven, and it's not necessarily best for conservation, at least not in the near future."

The Poppers are clearly thrilled these discussions are on the table. As Frank Popper points out, planners are used to dealing with issues of growth, but not with issues of decline. They talk about smart growth, never about smart atrophy, or even smart stability. Which is why the Poppers are excited about their next project, working with the state extension agent in Kansas to help compile data on such variables as natural and human capital - the good stats rather than the grim ones.

In places like Nebraska, North Dakota and Kansas, people are wrestling with fundamental change. Borrowing from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Frank Popper calls it the bargaining phase of the multiple stages of grief, from denial on to acceptance.

"Assuming that people are paying attention at all, lots of Plains places and people are still in denial or anger," he says. "But I'd have to say that a good chunk of the Plains is in bargaining ... I do think widespread acceptance (of a Buffalo Commons) is just a matter of time, however long that turns out to be. Personally, I expect to live to see it. But I come from long-lived stock."

Florence Williams, a former HCN staffer, freelances from Helena, Mont.

]]>No publisherCommunities2001/01/15 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHomegrown leaders: Lakota educators bridge two worldshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/157/5091
On the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, an
innovative Dept. of Education is determined to break the cycle of
poverty, poor school performance and lack of economic opportunity
that afflicts the Lakota youth.ROSEBUD RESERVATION, S.D. - Sherry Red Owl's conference room in the tribal Department of Education is chaotic, but it's the kind of happy chaos that reflects its main obsession: the schoolchildren of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in southern South Dakota.

Piles of reports, papers, pictures and boxes line the room and occupy several chairs. Wedged between kids' drawings looms a large version of the tribe's Educational Vision Statement, a document based on the Lakota concept of unkita wakanyeja, oneness, or participation by everyone in the well-being of children.

In one corner, a big, dark-complexioned doll perches on an uneven pile of papers by the coffee-maker. Students take the "infant simulator" home for a week. It cries loudly in random outbursts, requiring the frazzled caretaker to hold a key in its back to quiet it. The doll is called Baby Think It Over, and its presence is designed to help combat the tribe's extremely high teen-pregnancy rate. Fortunately, its batteries are not in at the moment.

In the midst of it all is Sherry Red Owl, a kind-faced woman wearing a turtle pendant, Lakota symbol of unity. Red Owl may sit at the top of the education food chain here, but she knows her success depends on doggedness, modesty and cooperation.

Her Department of Education is only seven years old, but already it is a model of Native American educational leadership. It is about to be the only tribal department in the country that independently certifies all reservation teachers, including those who teach in public schools in the county. Red Owl wants to ensure that all teachers are versed in the tribal Code of Education and in Lakota culture and history. If not, they can't teach here.

"We want to make the schools more responsive to the tribe and more accountable for student outcomes," says Red Owl.

Recent high school dropout rates waver between 7 and 35 percent, according to Red Owl. Only 12 percent of students seek post-high-school education. National test scores rank in the 30th and 40th percentiles. On any given day, 10 percent of the students are absent.

In a county that is the poorest in South Dakota - poverty here exceeds 46 percent - many families do not own vehicles. There's no ride to school for a child who misses the bus. Many parents are alcoholic. Of those students who make it to the local tribal college, the vast majority need to take remedial classes. Seventy-three percent of freshmen do not return for their sophomore year.

These problems are not unique to the Rosebud. The U.S. Department of Education says that among eighth graders nationally, American Indians are more at risk than any other racial or ethnic group: 42 percent belong to families in poverty; nearly a third repeat a year in school; and almost a third perform below basic proficiency levels in math and reading. They are the least likely to attend or finish college.

But Red Owl and a core group of other academic leaders, mostly female, are determined to reverse these trends. They have chosen a path between two worlds, one that they hope will help Lakota children discover pride in their traditional culture while learning the skills to compete in the larger world.

Rediscovering a lost past

Ensuring that teachers understand Lakota culture may seem a simple step, but it cuts against the grain of history. As early as 1885, tribal children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools, which were funded by the federal government and run by missionaries who forbade the students to speak native languages and learn Lakota customs.

Beginning in the 1920s, states began to take over the education of Indians. But the resulting public school system also used a generic, Anglo-centric curriculum. It was a double disservice: To this day, most adults on the Rosebud reservation do not know the Lakota language, and most are ill-educated by national standards.

"When a tribe feels a system of education is imposed by an outside, dominant society, there's a lot of bitterness and negative feelings. Those lingering impacts are the root causes of poor student performance," says Melody McCoy of the Boulder, Colo.-based Native American Rights Fund.

The new code is a sharp break from the past. It asserts, among other things, that kids should grow up healthy and alcohol-free, respectful and knowledgeable of their heritage, confident in their abilities and academically strong.

"It's pretty innovative for a tribe to be telling a public school what to do," says McCoy, whose organization helped develop the Rosebud's code and usher it through the South Dakota system as a pilot project in 1991.

"The schools were not partners with the tribe until a few years ago, and tribal presence has a lot to do with how people behave," Red Owl says. "We're seeing a lot more parental involvement, people feeling more comfortable with the schools, kids having more pride."

These changes appear to be improving the statistics that measure educational success. According to a study funded by the Carnegie Corporation, high school drop-out rates at the tribe-run St. Francis School went from 36.5 percent in 1989-90 to 7 percent in 1997-98. The graduation rate increased from 24 percent to 69 percent over the same period.

Even so, warns Red Owl, "These figures are not stable. They bounce around. This will be a process of evolution, not revolution."

While the concept of unkita sounds promising, can it change life on the reservation, where alcoholism, depression, child abuse, low-birthweight babies and dangerously overweight adults all rank high? Cultural knowledge for kids is important, but what about solid, baseline academics and the motivation to learn them? What will make kids believe they can have meaningful jobs? Where will the jobs come from?

A little school on a vast prairie

Those questions are brought into sharper relief when I visit Todd County High School, a public-funded school in which the tribe plays a growing administrative role.

Up close, the cinderblock and steel and glass buildings, with gleaming computers upstairs and an appropriately battered Vocational Ed auto shop downstairs, could be anywhere. But from a middle distance at the edge of the town of Mission, the picture takes on a new dimension. The prairie starts just behind the mobile homes at the end of the parking lot. The reservation is vast and isolated: 4.5 million acres of sand-colored grasses, picturesque pine-covered hills and a few cow-speckled, spring-fed gullies. The main tourist trajectory through Badlands National Park lies over 100 miles to the West.

As is its habit, the wind is blowing 30 miles per hour, turning a 40-degree day into a 12-degree chill. Twenty-five miles to the south lies the Nebraska border, which might be a consolation, only there's not much there, either. Just this side of the border is the tribe's largest private employer, the Rosebud Casino, with 139 people on the payroll.

While Mission is plagued by many of the problems facing depressed rural towns everywhere - lack of stores, basic services, entertainment, even a public library - it is different in one way from most of rural South Dakota: it, along with the rest of the reservation (pop.19,000), is growing at an impressive clip. This is partly due to a high birth rate (50 percent of the population is under age 20, compared to 31 percent for the state) and partly due to a culture that raises its young to stay close to home.

Even so, the nearest place to buy goods and services is 100 miles away in Pierre. What few businesses exist tend to be run by non-Indians. The tribe leases over 600,000 acres to non-Indians, since they're the ones who can establish credit. Tribal members technically own the land, but they can't put it up as collateral because it's held in a common trust (HCN, 8/3/98).

Inside Vocational Ed, I spend some time talking to Dennis Schmaltz, a pilot and teacher who helped snare a promising grant this year to build an airplane in shop. There's supposed to be a class going on, but no one has shown up. The airplane's kevlar skeleton perches forlornly on the worktable like a patient awaiting surgery.

"We thought this would really go over well because it's so different," says Schmaltz, who is teaching a companion ground-school class. Of his seven original students, two were suspended for fighting and one is in rehab. He shrugs. "What am I getting done today?"

The Rosebud is caught in a cycle of poverty, poor school performance, and a lack of economic opportunity. Kids don't see worthwhile jobs being offered, so they don't go to school. An under-educated work force keeps employers at bay. Without a better standard of living, kids remain underfed and underachieving. For generations, family members have not held a job. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, unemployment rates here hover between 44 and 63 percent. The per capita income is $4,803, one-half the state average. With 38 percent of the population receiving food stamps and 20 percent receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1997 (not including Bureau of Indian Affairs assistance), Todd County had the highest percentage on welfare in the state.

"Our biggest challenge in improving education is dealing with poverty," says Red Owl. "That's why economic development is the tribe's number one priority."

The tribal government is currently negotiating with a large agribusiness corporation to start a hog farm on the reservation, even though pork is priced lower than it has been in 23 years. It would be the third largest pork production facility in the world, and would have questionable impacts on the local environment. The tribe would supply the land and water, the company, capital and promise.

But nobody seems terribly happy about the prospect. "We are not a pig people," one person told me.

A powerful triumvirate

I feel deflated by the time I arrive in the principal's office, but then I watch the school secretary bouncing from phone to office, handing out candy canes to straggling students and asking about their day. On her headband, she wears a rack of stuffed fabric antlers.

The principal, Nancy Keller, materializes from behind a tinsel-covered wall. She is younger than I expected. A Lakota Sioux, she exudes an easy, no-nonsense confidence even though this is only her second year on the job. She wears her hair in a long, black braid, and holds an intricately beaded pen.

"I went to school here," she says. "I know these kids. I know their families. I hope we can stay here and our children can stay here. It's a beautiful place to live. I want them to have more opportunity."

With that, Keller describes what the school has begun to do or will do soon: cluster freshmen and pay more attention to getting them caught up (most drop-outs occur before the sophomore year), institute "career academies' so students can sample a profession and learn applied skills, utilize more Internet resources, require more college preparatory classes and more Lakota culture classes, establish stricter discipline, bring in elders to address girls-only assemblies on violence and self-esteem, strengthen home-study programs, place problem kids in a tribe-run intervention center, and more.

"I'm a person who likes challenges," she says, "and I expect the students to have the same outlook."

Together, Keller and Red Owl form a strong team for educational reform on the reservation. Red Owl enjoys the support of the tribal government (it funds the Department of Education and its staff of administrators, counselors and truancy officers) and the allegiance of the reservation's largest schools. Those are public-funded Todd County, where Keller presides, and St. Francis Indian School, newly managed by another homegrown reformer, Cheryl Crazy Bull.

This powerful triumvirate, Red Owl, Keller and Crazy Bull, graduated together in 1997 from a master's degree program in educational leadership for Native Americans. The advanced degree program, funded by the Bush Foundation, enabled these three and 17 others from the state's reservations to attend South Dakota State University one summer, then follow-up with classes from the Rosebud's Sinte Gleska Tribal University and Oglalla Sioux College on the neighboring Pine Ridge Reservation.

The program wouldn't have been possible without the support of Sinte Gleska, considered one of the best tribal colleges in the country. Founded in 1971, it has grown from a two-year community college to a fully accredited four-year university, offering advanced degrees in education, human services and business administration (it is the only tribal college to do so). Seventy percent of its students are women, and the average age is 30.

In a county where unemployment hovers near 60 percent, nearly all Sinte Gleska graduates find work. "We serve students who would not go to higher education if we were not in the area," says Lionel Bordeaux, dean of academic affairs. "We probably have the best teacher-education program in the state." That major churns out four to 12 graduates per year, who are, says Bordeaux, "100 percent employable."

That the reservation now grows its own teachers, many of whom are the best and brightest minds available, gives Red Owl great hope. Many teachers are now native, many administrators are now native - including members of Todd County's school board - and the district superintendent is native. The ducks are finally lining up, she says.

Both Todd County's schools and St. Francis Indian School now require students to study the Lakota language, take culture-based curricula classes and behave according to Lakota notions of respect. Since Todd County middle school initiated a culture-influenced social-skills program three years ago - requiring troubled students to seek peer and counselor help - suspensions have dropped by nearly half.

"We used to have a tough choice here: identify with Lakota roots and be cut off from mainstream culture, or identify with the mainstream and suppress your identity. It was really bad for us," says Lydia Whirlwind Soldier, the Lakota Studies Coordinator for the school district. "Now, there is a more middle-of-the-road path."

One tribe-run demonstration school is taking Lakota studies a step further. Begun as a home school for the children of an Anglo father and Lakota mother, Grass Mountain now has two paid teachers and eight students aged 6-12. The curriculum includes the annual slaughter of a buffalo, horsemanship, tepee-building, hide-tanning and Lakota astronomy, among more conventional offerings like math and social studies. An 81-year-old resident uncici (-grandmother') teaches language, spirituality and traditional uses of plants and animal parts.

"We want our students to have mastery of both Western and traditional knowledge," says Charlie Garriott, whose home-schooled son will attend Yale next year. "What does it mean to be Lakota in the 21st century? That's what we want to enable students to think about. We have a clear bias of wanting students to leave and broaden their world view, but then to come home and rebuild the Lakota Nation."

Sherry Red Owl hopes the experimental elements of Grass Mountain can seep into the more standard school system. "I keep thinking, if every one of our troubled kids had a horse to work with, he'd be okay."

Turning a prison into a homeland

What appear to be the Rosebud's weaknesses - its remote isolation and self-containment - may end up being its greatest strength. One example of this is the fact that the Lakota language, while underused, survives intact.

"The reservation used to be like a concentration camp," Whirlwind Soldier says. "We were forced to stay here when we were used to roaming the Plains. But now, we don't feel confined anymore. It's become our homeland."

As for bringing economic opportunity to the homeland, there is no shortage of ideas: commercial bison herds, pheasant and prairie dog hunting for tourists, renewable energy development. The tribe is applying for a $40 million federal "empowerment zone" grant for rural areas.

Thanks to a grant by the Kettering and Chiesman foundations, Sinte Gleska University's Sicangu Policy Institute has begun mediating a series of local dialogues on economic growth. It is an uneasy and complicated topic here.

"There are components of capitalism that fit here and components that don't," explains the institute's Nora Antoine. "We're a self-sufficient, strong, willful, contributing, mindful people, and we don't fit into easy categories. But I'm very excited about the dialogue and about involving families and kids."

Finally, I want to hear from a more recent member of the Rosebud's education machine, so I call 20-year-old Tess Crazy Bull (Cheryl's daughter) at her dorm at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, some six hours away. A sophomore, she is an English major hoping to someday teach at the university level. Of her high school classmates, two other Lakota Sioux went away to college. One of those has dropped out. A few of her friends are studying at Sinte Gleska, some are working at the casino, some are having babies.

Despite her homesickness, the foreign off-reservation environment and the brutal murder of gay student Matthew Shepard a week into classes, Tess perseveres. Will she return to live on the Rosebud?

"Absolutely," she says, with a conviction that most small-town kids lack. "My friends here ask me, "Why do you want to go back there? It's so depressed, it's so poor," but unless you go back and do something, it will stay like that forever. A lot of people only see the poverty, but there's so much more there, and so many good people. I love it there. It's home." n

Florence Williams, a former HCN intern and staff reporter, freelances from Helena, Montana.

For a free copy of the full report, External Evaluation Final Report, Rosebud Sioux-Tribal Education Department and Tribal Code, contact Rhoda Riggs at the Native American Rights Fund, 303/447-8760.]]>No publisher1999/06/21 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLiving out the trailer dreamhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/136/4363
One in six Westerners now lives in a trailer, but this
traditionally affordable housing can become an expensive trap, as
tougher zoning pushes trailers into crowded parks with
ever-increasing rents and regulations.Note: two sidebar articles, one giving a timeline of trailer evolution and another titled "The high end of home economics: Aspen's trophy home phenomenon," accompany this feature story.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. - The West would hardly be the West without the occasional trailer house breaking up the horizon. The trailer of the imagination is almost picturesque, like the image of Christmas lights dangling from a battered mobile home at dusk. But the West is changing fast, and today's trailer progeny, the "manufactured home," is everywhere - one of three new homes arrives on a flatbed truck.

At the same time, escalating land prices and tougher zoning have herded more than half of mobile-home dwellers into parks like Pueblo del Sol in east Las Vegas, where residents can find themselves signed up for a kind of domestic boot camp.

There, inside her yellow, aluminum-sided double-wide, Betty French hosts a small gathering of neighbors. They're not just swapping casserole recipes and drinking coffee. They are part of a growing social outlet in trailer parks: political activism. Although they pass cookies around a green formica table, they're here to complain, mostly about their landlord, and to strategize. French and her neighbors own their own units but pay rent to park them on a narrow swath of grass and pebble. It's an uneasy relationship.

"If the park owner (a California real estate corporation) has to put in a new sewer or trim some trees, we shouldn't have to pay for that," says French, 59, who moved to Nevada with her husband, a retired Army serviceman, two years ago. "We didn't realize how much our rent was going to increase every year."

Dee Burdell, a widow who has lived in Pueblo del Sol park for 15 years, agrees. "It never ends," sighs Burdell, a retired hairdresser who pays $450 a month for her minuscule patch of ground (not including mortgage payments on her double-wide), two-and-half times what she paid a decade ago.

"Now the park is putting double-wides in spaces designed for single-wides so they can charge more rent. It's too crowded." And, she says, she and her neighbors are subject to a restrictive array of codes and regulations that most conventional homeowners would never tolerate, including limits on stays by houseguests, the height of their grass, what they can leave or plant in their postage-stamp-sized yards, the size and number of their pets, what color they paint their mobiles, even where they can change a tire.

As nearby-park resident Gloria Shorter puts it, "They pick and pick and pick. They boss us around like Hitler."

If finding affordable housing has never been easy, neither has living in affordable housing. As the West booms, some residents are more squeezed than ever. No longer are trailer parks the nonexclusive ghettos of the down and out; now, they increasingly house the working service class, the retired middle class and transitional young families. Some have owned their own "stick-built" homes in the past, and found selling out well worth the price. But many are finding mobile-home life more difficult, and pricier, than they expected.

What started out looking like affordable housing has in many cases become an expensive trap for its residents. "We are captive tenants," says Karl Braun, who lives in a 25- by 54-foot model. "There are too many bad managers of parks and too many park owners that are, I'd have to say, quite greedy."

Business is booming

Two days after the tenants' meeting in Betty French's double-wide, the Manufactured Housing Institute hosts its annual congress in Caesar's Palace. Based outside of Washington, D.C., the MHI is the soft-shoed lobby of the industry. Its members come to Las Vegas not to discuss tenants' rights, but to celebrate the vibrant health of their market and to play a few slots while they're at it.

From his podium in the dazzling Circus Maximus theater, Gub Mix, director of the group's Nevada affiliate, welcomes the grateful throng of industry builders, vendors, park owners and bankers. Outside the grand auditorium, dealers pass out chips and hostesses pass out drinks.

The mood is euphoric. Fleetwood homes has just sold its millionth house, and business is booming across the board. Mix tells the crowd that the conference includes 2,000 registrants from 47 states, "with a combined net worth of over a billion dollars." He commends their prowess at the golf tournament, invites them to a poolside cocktail party, and encourages them to enter the annual prize-o-rama.

The day offers sessions on everything from how to benefit from real-estate investment trusts (REITs) to how to place bigger, more profitable mobiles on small lots. Solutions include reducing landscaping, building retaining walls, updating older models. Nearly every state has an affiliate of the Manufactured Housing Institute. Its top priorities are relaxing zoning, increasing profitability and fluffing up the industry's image.

"Remember," one MHI employee intones, "these are not mobile homes. These are manufactured housing."

Whatever you choose to call them, they make some people very rich. In 1994, Forbes called mobile home parks "one of the wisest real estate investments around." Wall Street has caught the whiff as well, with more and more real-estate investment trusts buying parks and going public.

Chateau Communities Inc., an Englewood, Colo.-based public company, owns and manages 50,000 mobile home sites across the country.

"It's sort of the investment du jour," says California affordable-housing banker Deane Sargent, "and it's driving up prices, forcing buyers to seek a high return on their investment." For tenants, he says, that generally means higher rents and reduced maintenance in the parks.

The hidden poor

Arguably the West's newest extractive industry, real estate has built great fortunes while rolling over the region's poorest residents. That it has done so points to a manifest failure of the region's burgeoning communities to address the thorny and persistent issues of affordable housing, land-use planning, poverty and the aging of the population.

Consider the statistics: Despite a rise in manicured, gated and pricey trailer parks, most mobile-home residents are still blue-collar workers or fixed-income elderly. Nationally, seniors make up one-third of the mobile-home population, and that percentage will keep rising. Almost half earn less than $10,000 a year, according to a report by the American Association of Retired Persons.

Meanwhile, even as its land prices and population boom, the West has lagged behind the rest of the country in income gains. In Montana, for example, the average real wage has fallen 6 percent since 1989, and the gap in income between rich and poor continues to spread. Nevada's plight is typical: Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has grown 49 percent since 1990. A recent county study there found that 60 percent of residents experience a serious housing-cost burden.

Not only are park residents exploited by landlords; they also fall prey to the bigger market forces of land-use in the West. The list is long: Unlike other homes in the West, mobile homes depreciate, even as their landlords' land values skyrocket. Cities like Las Vegas don't allow individual mobile homes on city lots, shutting owners out of that market. But even peripheral, suburban or sub-resort trailer parks are not a long-term solution, since as Western towns and cities grow, many rental parks convert to Wal-Marts, hotels or expanding airports.

In Washington state, for example, 56 mobile-home parks have closed since 1989, often displacing tenants with nowhere else to go. Eyeing future land sales, some park owners slack off on maintenance, creating unhealthy and unpleasant living conditions for their tenants.

Far from petering out, manufactured housing in the U.S. increased 230 percent between 1970 and 1993. Nationally, one in 16 people lives in a mobile home. In the West, the figure is even higher: one in six. In four Nevada counties, mobile homes make up over half the housing stock; in some towns, the figure is closer to 80 percent.

Across the West, mobiles account for one in three new homestarts. At the same time, mountain towns have grown more rarefied, zoning has tightened and the market has waged a fierce battle for the land beneath the trailers (see accompanying story). But the question remains: Where will people - ordinary people not seeking a second home - live?

Few communities, it seems, really like trailer parks, despite the red-faced efforts of the industry to improve designs and call them "manufactured housing communities." Typically, mobile homes are forced by zoning laws to the edge of town, often to sub-marginal land, where residents face floods, fires and, famously, hurricanes and tornadoes. (Joke: What do a tornado and a Moab divorce have in common? Sooner or later, someone loses a trailer.)

Most land-lease parks won't allow residents to build foundations, hence the tornado problem. Of 54,000 home fires in Oregon in 1996, over half were in trailers. Notoriously poor health and safety standards are improving, however, as federal housing codes change. But planning challenges remain.

In Apache Junction, Ariz., a sprawling suburb east of Phoenix, the trailer and RV boom created what was, until 1996, the largest town in America without a central sewer system. The population there, mostly retirees and snowbirds, balloons from 20,000 summer residents to 100,000 during the winter. And near Lake Mead, in Cottonwood Cove, Nev., "the census gives it a population of nine, but you go down there and there's 400 trailers, so the demand for services is clearly going unmet," says Clark County planner Don Mattson.

Looking for friends

Paradoxically, trailer parks are both unsightly and invisible at the same time. Few advocacy groups exist. The stereotype is that trailer parks are a drain on social services and a source of crime. Environmental groups generally dismiss them as a land-use nuisance. All this puts mobile home parks in a kind of limbo.

"It comes down to the social character of our towns," says Jackson Hole demographic consultant Jonathan Schechter. "Do we really want to become like the social Darwinists of Martha's Vineyard and say "piss off" to anyone who can't afford it here?" Jackson, he says, has not approved a mobile-home park "in decades."

While most communities acknowledge the desperate need for affordable housing, they often reject new mobile-home parks - usually for good reasons - but fail to provide adequate alternatives. In Bozeman, Mont., a proposed 243-space park in the 100-year Gallatin River floodplain was unanimously rejected by the planning board in March. Nearly everyone in town opposed it, from local ranchers and environmentalists to people concerned about impacts on local schools, roads and other services.

Even the one statewide group advocating on behalf of mobile-home residents was displeased with the proposal. "The developer wouldn't meet with us about our concerns," says Kevin Pentz of Montana People's Action. "We wanted long-term leases and the right to have an older mobile home. So we didn't take a stand." With the newer homes required there (typical cost: $45,000), the average lot-rent plus home mortgage would come to approximately $619 per month, according to developer Rex Holland. That is hardly a low-budget steal, especially for an insecure arrangement.

While not cheap, land-lease parks can represent the best of bad options for mountain workers. Nevertheless, they combine two ills: the burdens, risks and inflexibility of home ownership and a largely unregulated landlord relationship. While they help instill "pride of ownership," (another favorite phrase of the industry), many residents view them as transitional housing, though often less temporary than they thought.

Others regret pouring money into the hidden costs of the mobile-home commitment: higher interest and insurance rates, the depreciating property value, the escalating space rents, the time spent in tenants' rights meetings, the immobility of the "mobile" home.

"If I knew everything then that I know now, I would probably have done something different," says Alyce Maas, 55, who lives in Bozeman's King Arthur Court.

Moving, the solution that might seem obvious, is not as easy as it sounds. In Nevada, Burdell and the Frenches own trailers that are 20 years old, and many mobile home parks, eager to spiff up and boost rents, will not accept units older than five or 10 years. Even if they find a place to put them, moving a trailer can cost $5,000, a chunk of cash most owners don't have. (The term mobile home, of course, is a misnomer; 90 percent of units, once delivered, never move again, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute.) Because these homes may represent nearly all their equity, owners can't just abandon them.

It's easy to see why groups and individuals fighting to reform the practices of lease-land parks face formidable challenges. Pushing laws through state legislatures often involves butting heads with the well-oiled industry. Montana finally joined 28 other states in passing legislation requiring "good cause" for eviction in 1993. Previously, landlords had thrown out tenants who engaged in political organizing, says Jim Fleischmann of Montana People's Action.

In 1995, the Nevada Association of Manufactured Homeowners helped pass one of the strongest landlord-tenant laws governing mobile homes in the West. Nevada landlords can no longer evict renters without cause; they must post a sample lease agreement; they must give tenants a month's notice if the park is going on the market. The Nevada group, founded in 1973, now has 2,600 members, according to president Karl Braun.

Even with such victories, "we're way behind in the West in terms of rights and protection," says Boulder, Colo., housing activist Mark Fearer. Unlike California and Florida, which have strong housing consumer-protection laws, the interior West has a strong aversion to regulation, especially for anything resembling rent stabilization, a top priority among homeowners' groups.

Some tenants have discovered the best way to fight the landlord is to get rid of the landlord altogether. They simply buy the parks, or have a nonprofit do it for them.

Residents at Smuggler Mobile Home Park in Aspen, Colo., became among the first to band together to buy their park in 1982. Two years ago, Aspen's Lazy Glen followed suit. Such deals, however, require creative financing, savvy, assertive residents and a fairly hefty down-payment, making them few and far between.

Last year, promising co-op deals fell through in Bozeman and Durango, Colo., among other places.

"Most people have limited credit, no money, and they don't believe they can convert to cooperative ownership," says Sargent, who helps put together financing packages for residents seeking to buy parks. "The biggest hurdles are the willingness of the owner to sell, and the tenacity of the residents. But when it works, these are real communities."

But, in Washington state, a positive trend has emerged. A new nonprofit, Manufactured Housing Community Preservationists, gathered local and federal funds to help it buy three parks in the sprawling Seattle suburbs in the last three years. The group renovated ancient sewers, upgraded trailers to meet new fire and safety standards, and still managed to lower the rent.

"My rent went from $425 to $350," says Jan Thompson, a nursing student and mother of two who lives in the Avon Villa park in Microsoft-enhanced Redmond. "The people who owned it before were obnoxious. They wouldn't let me have a compost box behind the shed. Now I have that and a garden."

The city of Boulder, Colo., also recently bought a mobile-home park with the intention of selling it back to the residents in five years. Affordable-housing banker Sargent estimates that about 1 percent of the nation's 55,000 parks are either cooperatively owned or owned by a nonprofit.

"Our future is in buying or building our own parks," says Braun of the Nevada Association of Manufactured Homeowners. "It's different to be self-governed." Lisa Hardiman, an affordable-housing advocate in Bozeman, agrees. "We need more parks, but we'd like to see residents own the land. Otherwise, there's just too much insecurity." For example, says Hardiman, in the last 10 years, three parks around Bozeman have been sold out from under tenants, for development.

"Affordable housing is a problem that is not going to solve itself," she continues. "I'm going to push for mobile-home co-ops or other housing co-ops. A family can't afford to own land around here, but as a group, we can afford it."

Meanwhile, the states' homeowners' groups, having inherited the West's union tradition, keep plugging along. "You have to keep dogging the legislature," says 77-year-old Vickie Demas, a former casino hostess who helped start Nevada's culinary union. Incrementally, such groups are making headway. Colorado is looking at legislation requiring licensing of mobile-home dealers and installers. Nevada will soon try, for the fourth time, to pass a "rent justification" law, requiring park owners to open their books prior to a major rent increase. Oregon recently passed a law making it illegal for park owners to charge tenants extra for pets.

Moved to act

Back in Nevada, the Pueblo del Sol women are smoking cigarettes and cleaning up from their meeting. Linda Raabe says that just before moving here, she and her husband won a $250,000 lottery prize in Wisconsin. But they spent most of the money, and now they're living in a used single-wide.

"I'm still kicking my husband," she says. "We definitely should have bought a house."

Dee Burdell, for her part, is making plans to move into a conventional frame house next year. She hopes to sell her mobile and to have enough money for a down payment. "I've always enjoyed mobile home living, but I'm tired of the rules and regulations, the escalating rent." In the meantime, she won't be bored.

Says Burdell, "I'm going to head up the park's political committee."

Florence Williams writes in Helena, Montana.

You can contact ...

* Nevada Association of Manufactured Homeowners: 702/384-8428;

* National Foundation of Manufactured Home Owners, which tracks state issues, 717/284-4520;

* Montana People's Action, 406/585-1703

]]>No publisherCommunities1998/08/17 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOne county's misgivings over not-so-ordinary housinghttps://www.hcn.org/issues/113/3606
Architect and developer Michael Reynolds runs into trouble
with Taos County, N.M., over his belief that the "Earthships" he
builds don't require building permits or fall under local land-use
regulations.Taos County, N.M. - Architect and developer Michael Reynolds doesn't usually lock the gate to his property west of Taos, but ever since county officials drove out to inspect his work site, he's been viewing outsiders with a wary eye.

Recently a county code enforcement officer had red-tagged several houses under construction, and just after my visit, the officer returned with the sheriff to issue Reynolds a warrant to appear in court for violating the earlier stop-work order.

"Are they going to come with the tanks soon or what?" asks Reynolds, who seems hardly able to believe his bad luck. After all, he's been building houses in Taos County for 25 years.

But these are not just any houses, and Reynolds is not just any architect. He is the inventor, copyright-holder and chief proselytizer of Earthships, half-buried houses made from recycled tires, tin cans, glass and concrete. Sun-powered and energy-efficient, they are designed to be fully off the grid, which means free from commercial electrical power and phone lines and maintained roads. Comparable in construction costs to conventional homes, the dwellings collect rain, channel used household water into banana-tree planters and face south for maximum solar gain.

Here at the bottom of a dusty gravel pit off Route 64, the houses resemble bunkers more than anything. Showing them off, Reynolds almost forgets his legal troubles. "This is a unit we call the Nest," says the wiry 52-year-old as he points to a small, curved, concrete-and-tire compound. At 640 square feet, it is the Volkswagen of Earthships, and it's selling like hotcakes.

"We put in them everything we've learned. It's on the level of a mobile home, but it requires no heating, no cooling, it makes its own power, it's got hot and cold running water and sewage that'll produce plants.

Reynolds has built them everywhere, including Bolivia, Japan and hundreds of south-facing hillsides throughout the intermountain West. Since 1990, he has developed three Earthship communities with approximately 45 homes in the Delaware-sized northern New Mexico county.

His most recent, the gravel pit's Greater World Community a few miles west of the Rio Grande gorge, is slated for 80 to 100 Earthships.

But the communities' self-proclaimed independence - from county oversight as well as from the utility grid - has riled local officials and many citizens, including some environmentalists and former followers of the architect.

"As far as we're concerned, Mr. Reynolds has created three illegal subdivisions," says Taos County Planning Director Dave DiCicco. "He's violated the New Mexico Subdivision Act, the Taos land use regulations and the Uniform Building Code.

"This is a large-scale profit-making development," continues DiCicco, "and we have authority under our land-use regulations to evaluate him as a major developer." Until four years ago, Taos County had only an intermittent planning department, and permits were issued by the state. Since then, the county largely overlooked Reynolds, says the planner. "This isn't the wild West anymore, and we can't afford to be casual," he says, citing the burgeoning 4 percent annual growth rate around the resort town.

DiCicco wants Reynolds, like all developers, to provide flood and soil data, a water-use assessment and a road-access disclosure, among other things, for review by the local planning commission.

"Any time you are talking about bringing 100 families to the valley, no matter what type of house they live in, it's going to have an impact on the county," he says. "Mr. Reynolds' intentions are good, but we have to follow through and see if his experimentation bears scrutiny. The same law applies to everybody."

Until Reynolds complies with the subdivision review, DiCicco's office won't issue building permits for new Earthships on his property.

As is evident from the bustle in the gravel pit, however, Reynolds has no intention of complying with the stop-work order. "These are not subdivisions because we are not selling land," he asserts. Reynolds owns Greater World's 650 acres and sells his members, who currently number 25, the right to build houses there. The plan, he says, is to eventually turn the property over to the members, who will then own it communally.

In June, Reynolds and seven home-builders sued Taos County in district court to release their building permits. Judge Stan Read heard the case in Raton Aug. 23, and at press time the plaintiffs were awaiting his decision. In the meantime, they're not slowing down.

"We're going to keep going until it becomes like Waco, Texas, and we have a big scene," says Reynolds. "I can see how that stuff happens. In a state that has designated several thousand acres for testing weapons of destruction to humanity, can't we allow 650 acres to be allowed for testing methods of human survival? I'll go to jail for that, I'll die for that."

Texas refugees Jim Wilson and Bonnie McNain, who are building their Earthship despite the stop-work order, are perplexed and disappointed by the county's reaction.

"We came to Taos because it's supposed to be alternative." Now they say if they'd known about Reynolds' problems with the county, they would have looked elsewhere to build. As it stands, they and the others who are violating county law on Reynolds' advice could face fines up to $500 a day and misdemeanor charges.

Many residents of Taos are not sympathetic with the architect's plight, in part because of some ill-will following his first land development, called REACH, which stands for Rural Earthship Alternative Community Habitat. A dozen Earthships situated on steep slopes a thousand feet above the tiny town of Valdez north of Taos, REACH has spurred resentment among locals.

"In my opinion, Michael Reynolds' project above Valdez is the greatest violation of land ever done in the Taos Valley," says local activist Geoff Bryce. Bryce, who serves on the local acequia (ditch) commission, calls the project an eyesore that has resulted in erosion, access problems and a deep cultural wound in the largely Hispanic community.

"You can see that glass and stuff shining from a great distance and I think it's ugly and inappropriate," says Valdez postmaster Connie Espinoza. Agrees Beverly Armijo, who caters Mexican food, "Reynolds is trying to save Mother Earth and all that, but he's exploiting the rest of us. If we're forced to abide by regulations, so should he."

The biggest concern among valley residents is the same one that has plagued resort areas all over the West: population growth. "Any way you slice it," says Fabi Romero, who chairs the local citizens' planning commission, "Reynolds is impacting the county by bringing all these people in. He's impacting our roads, our schools, our water, air quality and our land. He needs to own up to that."

REACH Earthship owner Joey Townsend says she regrets that Reynolds' development was not reviewed by the county. "I have no road access to my Earthship," she says. "I have a gully. I've already replaced the transmission on my truck just trying to get there. If he'd had to have more engineering skills or a better ability to read the landscape, this wouldn't have happened. Subdivision regulations might have protected people like me."

But Reynolds argues that an Earthship is its own infrastructure, and complying with subdivision requirements would put the price of land out of reach of many of his members. Cheryl Powell, who is constructing her Nest in the gravel pit, paid only $3,000 for her building site. "It was like buying a parking space," says the recently divorced bookkeeper. She is willing to put up with bad roads and the promise of future title to the land. "For me, it was the only affordable choice. I am defiantly continuing to build because I feel it is morally right to provide shelter for myself."

Livingston, Mont. - Dana Gleason, an avid skier, thought he knew how to make a great backpack. In 1985 he founded Dana Design in the back of his garage with eight sewing machines. His product was a hit, and soon stores across the West were clamoring for more. In the first year, sales totaled $40,000. Just three years later, the company was selling $500,000 in products and employing 21 people.

But while Gleason knew a lot about backpacks, he knew less about assembly line production. The company had grown so fast that production was hardly able to keep up. So in 1988 Gleason approached Montana State University's new University Technical Assistance Program, which is designed to provide free expertise to Montana companies while giving students problem-solving experience. Housed in the "Montana Manufacturing Extension Center," the program is a prime example of the university's drive to esxpand the extension mission to every corner of the university.

Enter Alan Deibert, a 30-year-old grad student in industrial engineering at Montana State. Deibert not only helped unplug Dana Design's production bottleneck; he also wrote himself into a job with the company after graduation, fulfilling one of the university program's stated goals: to keep smart kids in the state.

"What's the point of educating top-quality students only to have them leave?" asks Bob Swenson, the university's vice president for research. "We need to help create successful companies here."

Since Deibert's unpaid internship with Dana Design ended, more students have been brought in, some to solve engineering problems and others to offer opinions on the latest prototype pack. "It's great to ask geeks for advice," says Deibert, now Dana Design's production manager. "A backpacker is the worst person to design a pack, where an engineering student will ask the most challenging questions. Students can be good for a company," adds Deibert, "because they're not afraid to be really creative and far-out. Most of the time, their ideas are dead wrong, but sometimes they're terrifically innovative."

Over the years, the assistance program and its students have helped Dana Design with everything from designing new mechanisms for testing aluminum strength in the packs' internal frame to creating a system for stuffing waist-bands. The company has also benefited from Montana State's engineering facilities; an on-campus machine regularly tests the tensile strength of Dana Design's fabrics and stitching. "Normally, we wouldn't have access to a machine like that unless we were a $50 million company," says Deibert.

Bob Taylor, the program's director, estimates it has contributed over 300 hours of consulting to Dana Design. The tens of thousands of dollars of free advice gives the company, and Montana, a competitive advantage. Dana Design now employs 200 Montanans in three facilities across the state, and its annual sales have topped $6 million. Its packs have won design awards from numerous magazines and organizations, including the nonprofit Alpine Institute of America. The company also won a national "blue chip enterprise" award and recognition from the Montana governor. Last year, Dana Design was bought by a large outdoor products company based in California, but Deibert says production will continue to be based in Montana.

For Montana State, the program represents a very new direction from traditional agricultural outreach. "We'd like to be a research arm for the industrial sector as we are for agriculture," says vice president Swenson. To that end, the program has assisted hundreds of small Montana manufacturers, including a host of new laser and high-tech firms, in the nine years it has been operating. Many of the companies hear about the program through local extension agents.

Taylor estimates the program has cost about $1.6 million so far. It has been funded in part by the university, in part by the federal Economic Development Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce and by various in-kind contributions.

In a state that is cutting deeper and deeper into higher education funding, the program's future remains uncertain. This is the last year of its federal grant. "We'll have to start relying more on state, private and university money," says director Taylor. "We think we've proven ourselves useful, but (continued funding) will depend on the mood of the legislature."